Updates

So, it's Thursday.

El Burrito spent a full 90 minutes in his crib before he finally fell asleep. That 90 minutes included about four trips in to give him two toy cars, his "grumpy book" (Winnie the Pooh), another book, and the truck he dropped. Sigh. He's on a tear this week, wanting to be read to almost half the total time he's awake. Not that I'm going to stop reading to him, but jeez, it makes it hard to get anything accomplished.

I just finished the earflap hat for my sister in Cold Detroit. I'm weaving in the ends right now, then I've just got to braid the cords and make the pompom.

I was watching some more of my Due South DVDs, and I'm just going to have to buy another copy of Season 1. I haven't gotten any reply from the studio, and it's been five years since I bought the set, so it was a long shot anyway. I was watching disc 2 today, and the last two episodes on both sides (*) are unwatchable. No visible damage to the disc, so I guess it was a burn error. That makes two discs with errors out of three in the set, so I may as well just buy a whole new set. Gah. I'm almost sure I checked these when I got them, but I guess I missed some episodes.

* I may have said it before, but I'll say it again. I absolutely HATE double-sided DVDs. They're touchy and finicky, you can't put them down anywhere for a second without chancing a scratch, and I can never remember which side is which, even when they're labeled. I was this close to really getting it once. Then I got the first season of Northern Exposure, with a production error that labeled the A & B sides of the first disc backwards, and that just fried whatever cell in my brain was keeping track of which side goes up.

I finally remembered to note what time I filled up the new humidifier. The big difference between warm-mist and cold-mist machines seems to be noise and speed. Our Holmes warm-mist could put out over two gallons per day - we had to fill it up daily, and a fill-up wouldn't last 24 hours. It was also quiet, since it worked on a heating element. However, the drawback was the filter - it got gunked up and had to be cleaned almost daily, with a new filter every two weeks or so (at $5 each).

The ReliOn is a cool-mist, so it's powered by a fan instead of a heating element. It only puts out about half a gallon per day on low - it's a 1-gallon model, I filled it up at 6:00 Tuesday night and had to refill it at 5:00 today. It might go faster on the "high" setting, but the fan on "high" is kind of noisy. Great if you need white noise, not so great otherwise. On the other hand, the filter only has to be changed once per season unless it gets lots of build-up, and ours still looking pretty good. Plus, we got some filters at Walmart last month, $2 for a 2-pack on clearance; not the same model, but with a bit of trimming they'll be the same size.

Pros and cons. I wish we could get more moisture in the air, but the filter costs on the other machine were a little steep and I'm not sure there's any way around the water build-up, other than buying filtered water for the silly thing.