Author or Home Handy Man

Sometimes readers forget authors are just like them.

We make mistakes, drive too fast or too slow, we vote, buy groceries and even take care of chores at home. You know the chores: cutting the grass, keeping the bird feeder clean, vacuuming and all that stuff.

This week, I'm working hard to finish the fourth edit for Zita's Revenge. Reading each chapter, still finding typos and sentences that make little sense. Verifying that the foreshadowing is done in a fashion you don't notice until you reach those last few chapters and remember mention of that object or event way back at the beginning.

I'm keeping at it, but a home issue from last week re-surfaced this week. I hate when that happens.

You think you have everything fixed and when you check a few days later, you're still seeing the problem. Has that ever happened to you? I'm not an HVAC trained professional, but we will attempt home care issues ourselves, before calling a trained professional.

I'm sure decisions like that have killed a few homeowners who made mistakes in their repairs. In our case, we noticed condensation and water dripping from a hot air exhaust duct from our home water heater.

That can't be right, but what's going wrong?

The only way to find out is to open up the duct work. But before you do that, you have to turn off the water heater, otherwise you're pumping harmful gases into the basement. Well, we don't want to do that. We turn off the water heater, and then remove the duct work that flows to the roof. We're looking for obstructions or something that might interfere with the flow of the harmful exhaust.

The first place we look is in the piping in the basement. We don't see any obstructions. This means we have to follow the piping higher.

We get a ladder and head into the attic, where the duct work goes between the ceiling and the roofline. After much finagling and wrangling. We find a joint and pull it off.

Last week in that same joint, we pulled out material a bird put into the duct to build a nest.

We also put a new cap on the ductwork on the rooftop to prevent the birds from getting inside the pipe and nesting.

Did we miss nesting material last week? The joint was clean, but we shined a flashlight toward the rooftop and we see more nesting material two feet higher in the duct. Argh. Using our hands and long pieces of wood, we pull the rest of the nesting material out of the duct. This time we verified the path clear to the rooftop and, using an augur, confirmed it was clear to the hot water heater.

I don't know why we missed it last week, but we did and it forced us to repeat the same process we did the week before. Ouch. Anyway, I lost time with the HVAC work, voting and helping my wife with some plans for next spring.

We will continue to monitor the hot water issue, because it's a dangerous situation and we want to verify it's fixed and not assume we solved it completely.

So, I didn't get as far on my writing as I wanted, but I haven't given up. More books are on their way.

Write every day!