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By Keith, February 7, 2010 1:25 am

I need another hobby like I need a hole in my head, but that didn’t stop me from buying a guitar.  Can I play guitar?  No, not a lick; hell, I can’t even read music.  So I’m trying to learn from watching videos and looking at chord charts.  Mostly when I play anything there are these embarrassingly long pauses between notes and chords.

After two days of finger exercises, the tips of my fingers on my left hand are red and tender.  I can feel the callouses slowly forming.  The hardest part thus far has been knowing when to stop the exercises before getting blisters.  Basically, I’m murdering notes, murdering my fingertips, and I need it to stop before the bleeding starts.

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By Keith, December 18, 2009 6:50 pm

This morning, I trudged out through the snowless pre-winter pre-xmas ugliness to Menard’s.  I was on a mission of mercy.  Tired of my toes feeling chilly even while wearing socks and slippers, I decided it was time to buy a space heater for under my desk.

My employer just handed out $25 Meijer gift cards last night at work, a space heater subsidy if I ever saw one.  So I headed straight to Menard’s.  I hear you questioning how that makes sense, and I’ll tell you.  Meijer’s website doesn’t show a very good selection of space heaters.  Menard’s’s’s doesn’t show any, but they are well known for selling household appliances that make heat, like microwaves, toaster ovens, and stoves.  Space heaters are just toaster ovens for you feet!

At Menard’s, I had no problem finding the space heaters.  They were quite logically located in the “duct work” area near the fireplace stuff.  I picked out a smallish model whose box said it put out a lot of BTU’s (whatever those are), and did 1500 of something else.  That seemed like a lot, so I carried the box to the the front of the store to check out.

The nice young woman at the register asked (half-heartedly) if I was interested in an extended warranty.  Resisting the urge to shout “EXTENDED WARRANTIES ARE FOR SUCKERS!” I politely declined and swiped my debit card, entered my PIN, declined any cash back, and received my receipt of my soon-to-make-my-feet-very-happy machine.

After removing my shoes and hanging up my coat, I tore into the space heater box like a pig with a whiff of truffles.  I plugged the heater into my already over-loaded surge protector power strip under my desk.  I set the temperature to “surface of the sun,” and turned on the fan.  I waited.  The cool air blowing on my ankles felt, well, cool.  I turned the temperature down to the lowest setting, and the fan turned off.  WTW (what the what?!)!!  I turned the temperature back up, and waited some more.  Five or so minutes passed.  My feet began to feel even more chilled than usual.  What the hell was wrong with my new heater?!

I unwrapped and began skimming the manual, warnings and precautions, and then the trouble-shooting section.  “Plug heater directly into wall outlet.”  Uh…”Do not plug into power strip.”  Ummmm… okay.  I turned off, unplugged, and relocated the heater to the spare bedroom and plugged it directly into the wall outlet, check.  Turned it back on.  Turned the temperature to its highest setting with the fan on.  No heat came out.  I turned on the oscilationer feature thing, and the cool air continued only now in a 30 degree arc.

Switching the heater’s setting from fan to 1 had the effect of changing me from an unhappy consumer of a broken piece of crap lump a foot cooler into an extremely happy joyous celebrator of a glorious foot toaster supreme!  Yes, I’m an idiot.  All I had to do was turn the thing from fan to 1 or 2 and heat would have poured out of the heater like molten lava.

My little space heater that could is now tucked away under my desk, and my feet are nice and toasty.  Warm feet are happy feet.