Lighter red, Barbie Ferrari, and the saga of the furnace non-filter

Posted On October 9, 2021

So… I bleached my hair, as I debated doing last week. Not that you can really tell, but it is a lighter shade of red despite 20 minutes with bleach sitting on there and then dyeing over with a medium blonde shade called “California.”

Oh well. Baby steps.

Or maybe it’s a sign.

In other updates from last week’s blog, tidying and prepping the family room to start shooting the web series is continuing. The family room has been used as a sewing/craft room and I had organized various sequins, beads, and bits and bobs of trim for art quilting and crazy quilting and whatnot into a series of those paper photo boxes you get at Michael’s.

Most were half full because of trying to be really specific with the box contents, but since I’m not doing as much of that kind of crafting lately and in preparation for next year’s move, I decided to condense things down into fewer full boxes. This eliminated more than a dozen boxes that I will donate at the thrift store next week, and freed up a bunch of shelf space to move all the dolls and their clothes and props down there:

Did I say all the dolls? Well, except for these two, who seem rather occupied:

Leave it to Ginger Babs to do the hard-hitting music journalism.

Well… something’s probably hard there but I wouldn’t say it was music journalism.

Note the U2 pin on the sofa. “STAND UP TO ROCK STARS”… LOL, as often seems to happen in the FB comments on anything U2 posts these days.

Ginger’s not exactly looking to do any standing up, of course.

In other doll/web series developments, Martin’s Ferrari arrived today, as mentioned a couple weeks ago as the setting for something that Sally insists absolutely didn’t happen even though we’ll see that it did:

I still haven’t gotten Nick’s Porsche, but then again, with the amount of DUIs that character racks up, it would likely be impounded most of the time anyway.

And production work has begun: I’ve recorded guide tracks for three of the eight character interviews. I will then go and record each side of the interview (Ginger Babs as the interviewer, and Nick might be a little disappointed because his interview isn’t gonna go the way the one pictured above is going), which then will tell me how long the various shots will need to be so I can then shoot it and edit to match the audio track.

It’s funny, when I started writing the series, I thought I’d be fine with Nick’s fake English accent and Jason’s Prairie hoser one, and that Padraig’s Irish accent was gonna be the nightmare.

Instead, Padraig’s was no issue (though I’ll have to pitch shift him down a little deeper) and both Nick and Jason’s accents need a lot of work.

Guess I’ll be spending the weekend listening to Bob & Doug Mackenzie skits on loop to nail Jason’s accent and Simon Le Bon interviews to get the pompous Britbong accent down before I try to do another recording.

The girls’ interviews won’t be as hard, but I’d tracked tomorrow’s Zamo the Destroyer episode before all this so after the 3 men’s interviews my throat was done for the day. So, on Monday I plan to track Paris and Sally’s interview guide tracks and maybe go back and record Ginger’s half of at least a couple interviews (I mean the real takes for Ginger).

So… it’s happening, bit by bit.

Holy shit, I have so much work to do on props and sets ASAP, lol…

What else… well, there was the Great Facebook and Instagram outage. Not sure how people survived not being able to post selfies for hours, but I managed thanks to the wonders of YouTube.

Oh, and there were a couple house-related things. My sinuses have been bad lately since the heat was kicking back on again with the cooler weather, and I figured it was time to investigate the filter on the furnace.

At some point, longer ago than I care to admit, my dad had assured me that I didn’t need to bother about that because supposedly I had a “permanent filter”. Which kinda sounded like bullshit, but I also didn’t really think about it.

I think he’d also said something about a screen. I figured, fuck it, I should slip a paper filter on top of this screen, so I measured the outside of the HVAC pipe there and concluded it must be a 20×20″ filter. So, I picked one up when I fetched some other stuff from Walmart.

Then it was time to investigate after turning the heat off. Well, the first thing I noticed when pulling out the “permanent filter was that it was caked in grey/brown dust and grime.

Oh… shit…

I grabbed my little Shark hand vacuum, thinking I would vacuum it as I pulled it out, but that was clearly not going to work so I just yanked the whole thing out. It was completely clogged. And it had chunks of cardboard on it. And it was hardly what I’d call a filter, being made of what mostly looked like blue plastic loopy fake steel wool.

What… the… actual… fuck…

It was instantly clear to me that there was no stacking a paper filter on top of it, nor any reason to since this fucking thing wasn’t going to be filtering anything.

In went the paper filter on its own.

And I took the “permanent filter” out to the patio to hose down, not that I ever intend to put the stupid thing anywhere near my HVAC system again.

The water coming off it went from black to brown to grey. No goddamn wonder my sinuses have been bad, and I can’t imagine this was good for the furnace either.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid and strange things in this house, since it’s 120 years old and has been reno’d on multiple occasions and I’m pretty sure some of those renos were done by brain-damaged cretins, and the previous owner seemed like a nice enough lady but with even less comprehension about house maintenance than I have, but this might well take the cake.

Now, I did look online and apparently there are “washable” filter furnaces that are blue plastic, but those still look more like a blue felt, whereas this looks like it’s made out of the same material as… well, like I said, those plastic fake steel wool scrubby things for washing pots and pans. I could see right through it in spots once it was hosed off.

And I clearly should have investigated much sooner and also not believed my dad when he said not to bother about the filter.

Oh well, from now on, it’s paper filters and I already set up a reminder to change it just after Christmas. And it’s something I’ll know to be mindful of in my next house.

The other house-type thing was that it poured on Wednesday and the water was cascading over the edge of the eavestrough, a sure sign of a blockage.

I hate ladders, but I did get up there on top of a step stool and I couldn’t quite reach all that well, but I was able to use a little gardening hand fork sorta tool to dislodge a bunch of leaf debris that found its way to blocking up the access to the drainpipe.

Changing furnace filters and clearing drainpipe clogs… I guess that means I’m officially an adult, eh?

Well, let’s wrap up with a few pics from the garden: