Wetter and Dryer: The Plumbing & Appliance Servicing of Spring

A few features of homeownership will now get their turn among the updates on all things Roediger House, in part because they occurred so close to one another. Well, that and the fact that the blog is very much my record-keeping chronicle to help me track the events of homeownership.

While doing laundry back on March 6, I tossed the second load of the morning into the dryer and tried to crank it up but the drum failed to start turning. The washer and dryer are pretty good machines and have held up well, given that I got them in March of 2007. So, when the dryer took a turn toward the inoperable, those damp clothes then found themselves draped over all the kitchen table chairs and on the generous spread of stair railing that this old house boasts, because I was headed to Virginia the following week and there was no time to get it repaired.

Of course, the first service I called and scheduled did not show up the following Wednesday. The second company I called does not work on LG appliances. So I had to make a smarter choice and call Affordable Appliance Service and get on Mr. Rod Cory’s agenda...while working around more travel.

Mr. Cory came first thing back on March 19, diagnosed quickly that the belt had broken, and he also gave the whole dryer a much needed cleaning and tune-up. He was excellent and I’ll be happy to have him to call on again when the need arises.

The other recent service call involved plumbing. For a year or more, the main kitchen sink faucet has been swinging fairly freely because its securing nut was corroded over but was also loose. Delta had sent me a lifetime guarantee replacement, but only after they’d first told me my damage was not covered and I’d bought another one myself.

There was also a leak in the water supply lines under the wet bar sink, so that also got addressed.

Finally: with all the toilets having reached the ripe old age of 17 or 18, I wanted their innards evaluated and, where necessary, replaced. A couple of them get a little cantankerous (yes, that’s a pun) when there is a heavy presence of guests (or a houseful of amazing UNCSA film students!). I wanted them back on their game for when nature calls your name.

They also flushed the hot water heater tanks and, for the upstairs unit, that’s its first time since it was installed, so it was definitely overdue.

And since this is 2026, and not 1976, an appointment for service is not a guarantee that the service provider will follow through. It took two weeks to get the dryer fixed because of the no-call/no-show by the first appliance repair I contacted. But were you hoping the plumber would be better? Nah. That appointment was made about a week-and-a-half in advance, and two minutes after the scheduled time, as I waited outside in the morning chill to greet the plumber, I was informed nobody was coming. So that got pushed back another week.

I find it interesting that I’m supposed to understand that these things happen—that a technician might fall ill or have a sick child—but the plumbing company itself then acts like this never happens, because they have no back-up plan to manage it. I don’t think the one who runs the business is supposed to have no system in place for what the customer is supposed to accept as a matter of course.

Sometimes this is a blog, and sometimes this is an extended whine. But I can’t help but conclude that what service providers would like to pretend is a fluke begins to feel an awful lot like a philosophy.

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Side note: while I very much want to patronize local businesses, that’s becoming increasingly impossible. Is there such as a local business anymore?

After changing pest control companies after my long-time provider was bought by a UK global corporation, I just got word that my “new” pest control was acquired in late 2025 by Lookout Pest Control of Georgia, which owns a lot of local businesses like Ray’s. And Lookout Pest Control is a “portfolio company” of the private equity firm Percheron Capital of San Francisco and New York.

PF Plumbing was founded in 1985 by Paul Freer, but in 2023, the company was acquired (in whole or in part?) by Hidden Harbor Capital Partners and its large corporate entity Air Conditioning Specialists of Georgia. Is that in any way noted or prominent on the PF Plumbing website? Of course not, but if you click on their “Privacy Policy” link, you’ll find yourself magically transported to an ACS page.

Even my love-hate relationship with long-time HVAC provider Webb Heating & Air Conditioning appears to have begun the courtship and dance with being subsumed by a much larger entity: Turnpoint Services, which itself is owned by OMERS (originally, Ontario Municipal Employees' Retirement System) Private Equity of Ontario, Canada.

The RHA Report Project

It began with rooting around one winter afternoon last year in search of my trove of bank statements, hoping I’d turn up a checkbook cover to replace the tattered one I’d been using. But then I dug a little deeper because I also felt sure I had a copy of the first deposit slip for my savings account, started at First Citizens Bank in Buies Creek in 1972. Because the closure of that branch had at that time recently been announced, somewhere along the way I thought I’d probably put up some social media post about it, and I like digitizing things when I get a chance as another approach to long-term storage.

But a random box adjacent to my exploration had items that caught my eye: bound copies of the Final Report I wrote in 1989, summarizing the issues and events and philosophy from my year as president of the Residence Hall Association at UNC-Chapel Hill. I brought a copy out of the attic and sat down to read it and got all interested in it again...and dug into other saved files and looked into the current activities of RHA at UNC via their social media. Then I came across a mention from the UNC alumni magazine that the University Archivist had asked that graduates with student organization records share them with the Wilson Library Special Documents Collection.

In the quiet and still-dark of late winter last year, that set me onto a six-week project that wrapped up just as March was coming to an end and spring had at last emerged. I retyped the report (no saved digital version could be located and I probably couldn’t access it anyway after 35 years of advances in technology!). This let me fix a limited number of syntax and word choice issues but also I found myself with more to say, so I added footnotes for clarification, context, or editorializing, and then I also wrote up additional thoughts and included them as a new Appendix.

I pulled out my trove of saved files from the filing cabinet and discovered it’s actually not hard to use my multifunction copier/printer to sheetfeed documents for scanning. Now everything from my term has been digitized.

For somebody who felt like he got to be on the front end of website creation and management in the mid-1990s—and whose skills were not bad at that time—but who long ago got left behind by the enormous advances in coding and stylesheets and scripts, it’s always a delightful but foolish errand to reignite those pursuits. Long ago, I should have gotten a professional website for myself, for instance. But now there is not only a printed version of the updated report; a fully-developed web version of it, with all the supporting material and archived documents, is published for those who are interested enough to dig into it.

A significant shortcoming of my meager web design efforts is that the overall site is not great on a mobile device—I still have a long way to go with responsive design so that the layout adapts to small tall screen sizes. For now, it is pretty decent on a desktop, and that’s where I’ve left it. The original and printed versions were submitted to the Special Collections archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill and they have also archived the digital records.

A digitized report, scanned pdfs of all those documents, and a hunger to re-explore website design? A perfect storm for evening pursuits and whiling away weekend hours for about six weeks when the long end of winter slowly unfolded.

The Birthday Cards Project

If I know your birthday, and I have your address, there is a fair chance that you will find yourself on the receiving end of some birthday card I've lovingly (or giddily) photoshopped and MS Worded into being. In the quiet of the year's end and before work had started up in earnest, that's the project I set my sights on: trying to work up birthday cards for 2025 for the folks on my long-maintained list.

Now, as is my particular bent, here comes the backstory. On some visit to an office supply store like Staples or Office Depot on a long-ago work trip, I chanced to grab a box of Avery notecards suitable for inkjet printers. I thought it'd be a nice way to easily produce some basic Roediger House notecards, using the original pen-and-ink graphic that came to me at the time of the house purchase. I also experimented with using instead some photo I'd snapped as part of daily life, like that shot of Sumner by the fireside, comfy in my old man's chair.

Over time, I began playing a bit with the lay-out and design, every once in a while crafting a special card from an idea that popped into my head. Then I started making an occasional birthday or thank-you card, especially once it seems that manufactured greeting cards had gotten much more expensive than I liked. I toyed with a different format and printable cards, for post cards, as well.

Maybe there are many who still embrace the tradition of holiday cards each December, with their curated address lists hastily updated near year's end; I still love that endeavor and have wanted to maintain the practice. Handwritten correspondence, or dropping in out of the blue, and especially taking note of the birthdays of good and special people all seem to be fading customs, or they've been supplanted by social media and electronic communication and the ease of a text message adorned, perhaps, with some emoji or meme or jumpy gif. I still like the idea of a birthday card.

Other holidays sometimes get swept up into my mania, so perhaps you were in my sights when I made Easter, July Fourth, or Halloween cards to send out. I'm also not above executing other random ideas into cards, whether it's because I found it amusing or to note some significant event or to send love or hugs or encouragement.

Although I have stocked up on those nice perforated Avery notecard sets for printing, I also realized a much more affordable route for my grand schemes was simply buying reams of white cardstock and the "invitation"-sized envelopes that fit them perfectly once cut and folded. As long as I keep my excellent color inkjet printer well-supplied, I guess this card-creation indulgence might continue for the forseeable future.

Welcome to 2025

The holiday spirit never settled on me this year, even though I cherished gatherings with friends and the delightful addition of my brother-in-law to the household during the break between semesters. I very nearly failed in my annual Christmas card tradition, scrambling to get them all done in an uncharacteristically quick three days, all the while reveling in how much I enjoy turning my thoughts while signing each one to people I’ve known far and wide and long and short. This year’s Roediger House card seemed to strike quite a few people in some kind of way because there was a spike in texted responses from folks that was so very appreciated.

It was a December of much movie-watching and idle projects, and not nearly enough of the cooking that I want to do when there’s this ample supply of uncommitted time, because my morning weigh-ins were bent on being a persistent warning and things got a little out of control. (Last Saturday morning was my highest pounds reading since 2018 and I was not amused.)

The nondescript weekend nestled between two holidays, when it’s a mystery as to what day or date it is, was also a wild weather ride. I’ve already belly-ached about the cold and drear of Friday and Saturday, and that misty malaise and those well-chilled temps led to a quick second fire of the season. (I obsessively count things: this was Fire No. 95 since the kitchen renovation and addition of that wood-burning fireplace in 2009.)

Sunday was winter’s Southern sensation of weird warm temps, high humidity, more precipitation, but also an ongoing watch for thunderstorms that never quite materialized here. If Saturday trapped us in the 40s, waking up to 60°F that morning was a mixed blessing. But hey: I prepped a set of logs to be ready for whenever the next fire needs to be lit, and I was glad it was warm and not raining while the coffee brewed so that the task could be more comfortably accomplished.

But here we are to begin a new year. My honest report on this first day of 2025 is that the life of home and work is marvelous but my fears for our nation’s future are always sitting nearby, waiting to pounce with their oppressive depressing weight at any moment. I will bear in mind the useful guidance found in what my mother had placed and positioned all over her house, because she was a wise woman: I will change the things I can; I will find a way to accept the things I cannot change; and I will choose as wisely as I can where my energies will be placed and what costs I will bear. As others have noted with helpful sagacity: it is a time for choosing. I hope the coming year bears marvelous fruit from all of your own wise and necessary choices!

Election Day 2024

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The US Postal Service Is Suffering

The expansive churning and unending wake of destruction left by the "presidency" of the twice-impeached/four-time-indicted criminal defendent Donald J. Trump has far-ranging repercussions from which I don't think we will ever recover. From beginning to end, and from top to bottom, it played out like a criminal enterprise, with a grifter-in-chief attracting like-minded pickers of the public pocket, and today's blog post focuses on one of those in particular: Louis DeJoy, currently and inexplicably the Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service.

It's bad enough that, thus far, companies in which he has significant financial interests and/or companies that he owns or runs are being awarded sizable contracts from the USPS (see this from Forbes, or this from NBC News, and especially this article from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).

It's not just dipping deeply into the public trough to line his own pockets and manipulate the awarding of contracts to maximize his companies' income and kneecap their competition. It's also the cynical and nefarious undercutting of the USPS service excellence especially in order to diminish the voting options via mail particularly for Democratic-leaning voters.

It is the larger and expansive impacting of the quality and timeliness of mail service that has become so very galling to me. Within the last year, when I made a concerted effort to be better about communicating with friends especially at birthdays and on special occasions or holidays, I quickly learned that there is no dependable timeframe for when to mail things. So I began attaching stickers of my own to mailed items, indicating when I actually put them into a post office box or dropped them off at a post office location. The first of those is above. Then, I modified it slightly for the Labor Day cards I sent out:

Regular blog readers are also probably among those who have received cards along the way, so some of you know how long it has taken for mail to reach you...

...or to wait in vain for mail that has never arrived. It took two-and-a-half weeks for a birthday card to get delivered to an address here in town, and mail to Oklahoma regularly takes 2-3 weeks. At least one card did not even receive a postmark until four days after I had mailed it. Recently, I had three pieces of mail returned to me with yellow USPS automated stickers saying they were unknown addressees and could not be forwarded.

Quite inexplicably, they had already received USPS barcoding and ZIP+4 codes that were correct for those addresses.

So now I'm just exceptionally angry about how the US Postal Service is being run. When Halloween cards went out, there was another date-stamp sticker to adorn the backs of the envelopes:

Update: Here's the label for the 2023 Christmas card envelope flaps:

And now I've made a yard sign:

All the US Postal Service employees I get to interact with are busting hump and are stretched incredibly thin. I hope they see in this my full support, as well as recognition that their jobs have become even more miserable, especially if a lot of customers are bitching and moaning at them instead of at the political crookedness of the leadership and those who appointed them. I lay it all at the feet of the Chief Enemy of the US Postal Service: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.