13:41 – Oh, boy. I just tried to extract my most recent data backups from two flash drives. Both files blow up with an error message. I’ll try earlier versions from the flash drives. If those don’t work. I have a hard drive copy uncompressed that I can try.
The wood stove is installed and tested with burning paper to make sure it draws normally. The guys we’re contracting with to maintain our main heating/cooling system installed it. They strongly recommended getting some good firewood rather than using the pile of rotting stuff that’s sitting out back at the fence line, although we could use that in an emergency. Since it’s a new stove, they said we should expect it to emit a strong odor when we burn the first load of wood. They recommended just buying a small amount of firewood at Lowe’s and using that for the first burn-in pass. I told them I’d just open the back door and let the odors go outside rather than into the house. The flue is completely unused, so they recommended just using the stove as we normally would for the first year and then getting a chimney sweep out to look at it and recommend how often it needed to be cleaned.
I fixed the small TV upstairs, which had randomly fluctuating brightness. I thought we were going to have to return it to Costco, but it turns out that random brightness fluctuations on Vizio TV’s are a feature, not a bug. All I had to do was change the viewing mode from Normal to one of the other modes. I think I picked Gaming. It now works as it should. I can’t believe anyone would consider Normal mode to be in any way normal. At least Vizio’s WiFi implementation Just Works, so we’re good for now. I’ll set up the Roku with the big screen TV downstairs, at least until I have time to run an Ethernet cable up to the den/sitting room.
We’re gradually getting things normalized here. I’m looking forward to running some local errands once I have a moment. I want to visit the gun store, which is owned by our closing attorney’s husband, and stop in at several local places that look interesting. I also want to stop by the local LDS church and meet the people there. When I mentioned that to Barbara, she said, “We are NOT joining the Mormon church.” I agreed with her, but pointing out that LDS churches welcome non-members to take part in their emergency preparedness programs.