Home improvements part 2: Guttering

02010-08-07T15:02:20+00:00

As mentioned in part one, it rains heavily in Austin. I noticed during the first couple of winters that water would pour in sheets off of the front and back roofs, and pound onto the steps up to the decks. It wasn’t long before the paint in the splash zones peeled away. I sanded down, primed, and repainted, and a year later it had been pounded away again. The problem wasn’t hard to diagnose: the house had no guttering, and the shape of the roof was basically funneling water towards the deck roofs, and hence to the decks themselves–and particularly the steps.

After 25 disaster-free years

02006-04-21T18:18:00+00:00

For the first time in my life, I just spilt liquid on a computer. The computer was my ThinkPad; the liquid was plain water, from a glass on my desk. The entry point for the liquid was the usual one, the keyboard. So far, no ill effects; I’ve removed the liquid that got into the DVD drive, and will leave it to dry out. Of course, this isn’t much of an event.