Spring and other things

Wow... two months with no posts. What a privilege it is to have no pressure whatsoever to blog! I tend to want to reserve blogging for our travels, but there hasn't been much lately and won't be much in the near future.

Easter

We did head down to see the family on the farm over Easter. It was a short visit, as usual. After an Easter church service, a number of fine gents came over to the farm for what I believe is the second annual Easter "shoot stuff" event. Such an event involves a dozen or more firearms congregating, with a host of grubby trigger fingers helping deplete the region's ammunition supply. Even the minister stopped by for a few rounds!

Shotguns or varying types and sizes, some .22s, a .30-06, the standard hunting fare. This isn't the States, so no crazy machine guns or any such goodness.

This van load was one fellow's contribution.


Manning the trap (the machine that flings clay disks).


Lining up for a shot.


If you look closely at the next picture, you'll see the clay target disintegrating at the top right. Good timing, me!


A tiny sampling of the garbage created.


After three hours of shooting stuff, I understood why most of the guys wore ear protection. Fortunately the ringing in my ears subsided soon enough.

Fridge

Well, freezer actually. Our fridge/freezer in the kitchen has in the past few years made some interesting noises. When we first encountered them I eventually learned from the interwebs that there might be ice buildup behind a panel in the bottom freezer. This apparently is a common enough problem with this fridge, where the defrost cycle isn't perfect, and the defrost fan ends up with ice built up around it. The sound is the fan hitting the ice.

In the past, I would empty the freezer and point a blow dryer toward the back of it. This would melt enough ice behind the panel that the noise would disappear. (It would also cause a frighteningly cool display of green electrical arcs that threatened to end my budding appliance repair career on the spot.)

Anyway, the previous noise incident was only a few months ago, and I've been getting sick of having to go through the routine so often. When it happened this last time, after a few days of noise the entire unit actually quit working and displayed an error message. Various websites told of various expensive parts that would need replacing, but a few suggested it was just more ice buildup. So this time I actually removed some more hardware and got in behind the back panel. Here's what I found.


The defrost cycle fan is top centre, with a big fat infringing chunk of ice to its right. It's no wonder my 15-minute hair dryer bouts never solved the problem for very long! Having removed the massive growth, let's hope this latest fix give us a few years' grace. (Although to us it's just an inconvenience... the landlord's the one on the hook if things die. Go renters!)