Do I really have it together? Have I been hiding things?

From 2024: This draft got updated in 2020… and then probably didn’t get published because like, I wasn’t ok through all of the pandemic and a lot of people really weren’t ok, so it seemed like, kind of a tone-deaf post and then when it wasn’t tone-deaf politics were bringing me down (I assume Trump’s election is why it didn’t get posted originally).  Politics are still terrible, but… I mean, they do put things in perspective.     

Do I really have it together now?  I’m not as sure!  But I think I really did have it together back in 2015.  It’s been a rough decade or so.  I blame Citizens United.

From July 2020:  This post is from 2015!  Just sitting there, in the drafts, unpublished!  As an update, High School English seems to have beaten DC1’s perfectionist tendencies out of hir. 

From 2015:

There’s a common theme on some of the more… dramatic… lifestyle blogs.  This idea that nobody has it together.   Everybody fights with their spouse.  Everybody has massive major problems.  They’re just lying and pretending that everything is ok.

On the whole, yes, I mostly have it together.  And that’s ok.

Not like I don’t do stupid things:  See recent trip sans credit card.  But it’s hard not to see the humor in that, and I’m very good at pushing the annoyance out to the CC company and not to myself.  This is why I had a back-up plan, why I kept calling the first company, but it’s irritating when the back-up plan fails.  And I know I’m supposed to use the CC at least once a year, but meh, I have a lot going on and I’m going to forget from time to time.  I don’t think this means anything deep about me.

I do get very stressed out at work on occasion.  But these stresses are usually because of taking opportunities.  I’ve done research long enough that I know it’s messy and sometimes I am just going to fail flat on my face.  But that is far better than not taking chances at all, and every failure really is a learning experience.  That doesn’t help when I feel like I’m back in grad school with a paper due on a short deadline that I haven’t even started that someone really important is going to be judging me on but I can’t work on it because I have these five other much easier projects where I know what I’m supposed to do also looming.  But I also know that more famous people than I will end up submitting something crappier than I did and that there will be second and third chances to redeem myself before a final deadline.  If I end up not getting included, that sometimes happens with even very good papers, and at least I tried.  I feel a lot calmer though when I have a path going forward– it’s the omigod omigod what am I going to do that freaks me out.  When that’s happening I’m too stressed to blog about it.  When it’s over I wonder what the big deal was.

Yes, my husband and my marriage and my family life really are as idyllic as advertised.  So is #2’s.  I don’t know if it’s that we both married our high school sweethearts so we’ve gotten all our major fights out decade ago, or if it’s that our husbands are chill amazing guys (they are), or what, but there’s trust and teamwork.

My kids are great.  Age seven was a bit of a pill, but age eight is much better.  We still have worries about perfectionism with DC1.  DC2’s eczema has cleared up and zie has outgrown hir food allergies.  They’re both amazing and wonderful and challenging and active and tiring and they want to be good kids.  I cannot complain.

I really just don’t worry about my appearance.  I’m sure if many of you had my appearance you’d worry about it (and you’d look a lot nicer even though you were worrying, or because of it).  I just can’t care and I don’t have to because it’s fine if I look a bit dowdy at work.

Making more money than I ever dreamed (especially since my dreams were not actually that big– I dream bigger now) helps a lot.  Once we passed a certain savings level it was a lot easier to say, “well, it’s only money and we have money.”  (This was true even when “certain savings level” was a 6K emergency slush fund, but now we can handle losing bigger amounts like 4.5K prepaid to a daycare that goes out of business.)

My life now is just so much better than it was in middle school (something I still, deep down, probably haven’t gotten over) that I can’t complain.

Sometimes genuinely bad things happen.  Infertility.  Miscarriage.  Pets die.  Grandparents die.  Mothers get cancer.  Fathers get shingles.  Extended family members get into horrible financial difficulties or teenage pregnancy or trouble with the law.  These are real and horrible.  The kind of things that put minor stuff in perspective.

So, what’s the point:  1.  Not everybody is lying.  2.  How a person reacts to setbacks is important.  3.  Don’t manufacture problems because you want to be “brutally honest” unless you’re  a performance artist.

Figured out why I’m not as interested in watching Try Guys anymore

First off I just don’t have a whole lot of time right now.  But even so, I’ve added a dropout.tv subscription after running out of things I wanted to watch on YouTube, so it’s not just that.

I was listening to Dear Hank and John, only it was Hank Green and Sam Reich from College Humor/Dropout.  They were talking about Taskmaster.  My entertainment worlds collided.

The day before I’d been trying to listen to a Try Guys Podcast and switched to Eat the Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster with guest Kiell Smith-Bynoe because on the TryGuys Podcast Keith had suggested that the person who ran around naked out of the bath shouting Eureka was Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton or someone like that.  (Archimedes!  I screamed mentally, and I don’t mind if you get the wrong person, but at least get the right Era and part of the world.) Ed and James and Kiell made a lot of dick jokes, but there was a wide variance to the humor.  They knew things and some jokes were dumb but some were smart and they shared knowledge instead of ignorance.

Keith isn’t dumb, but he’s ignorant about a lot of things.  Raine (their podcast person) is ignorant about anything except current pop culture.  And Zach often pretends to be dumb.  (Why pretend?  Because when he’s talking on non-Try Guy podcasts he’s extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful and has actually said he plays the dumb persona on Try Guys on purpose.)  I’m too old for that.

What’s missing with Ned and Eugene gone is a baseline level of knowledge and competence and the willingness not to hide it.  They’ve brought in outsiders, but Kweisi is similar to Keith and while I love watching Jonny’s baking stuff (his area of expertise), it’s more of the same in almost any other situation.  There’s no contrast.  Kweisi would be fantastic with Eugene or someone like a Ned who wasn’t a douche, but with Keith or with Zach pretending, there’s too much overlap.

One reason Eat the Menu still works for me is because Keith has a phenomenal knowledge of the fast and fast casual food industry.  He knows stuff and shares it and can compare with previous experiences.  There’s learning and knowledge and growth (though he really should have known not to eat that whole fried mac and cheese ball in the first Cheesecake Factory episode– I like the show better before he gets a food coma when he’s actually talking intelligently about the food).

After I wrote most of this post, they had Grant from College Humor/Dropout on the Eat the Menu and these points were exactly illustrated by the conversation about where Tuscany is.  Grant and Keith may look alike, but Grant has a lot wider general knowledge base.  I just… need some general knowledge and some amount of me learning a little bit in my entertainment.  It doesn’t have to be everybody, but I need at least one person who KNOWS stuff.

So, yeah, my recommendation to save TryGuys is for Zach to shed his “I’m the incompetent one” persona, and/or for them to bring on more guests who contrast against the ignorance.  People who might end up being good at whatever they’re doing even if they haven’t tried exactly that thing before.  Like if they’d brought someone tho did other kinds of art to the recent glass-blowing episode instead of just three stoners.

Apologies for anyone for whom this is too inside baseball!

Do you have any thoughts on Try Guys/Taskmaster/Dropout.tv/Hank Green/etc.?  What makes your video entertainment work vs. not?

Dealing with saying no to getting half the childcare tax credit doled out in monthly checks

This weekend I discovered that the IRS is sending people checks for half their child tax credit monthly.  Right after I learned about it, I discovered that *we* somehow qualified by getting a check for $333 in the mail, even though our last year’s income was still upper-middle-class even with DH unemployed (we’re in the phase-out range).

I do not know why they decided they had to send us a check when they HAVE OUR DIRECT DEPOSIT information.  Maybe to make it more salient?  I don’t know.  (One of my friends thinks the check was a mistake since they were supposed to honor direct deposit preferences.)

In any case, we don’t want it!  We are in the situation in which we would likely just have to pay it back at tax time (dual earners with similar incomes => not enough taxes withheld plus dividends) and it is seriously irritating to have to remember to deposit a check every month.  Back when our reimbursements came as checks this would have been less annoying, but everything is direct deposit nowadays.

So according to the IRS page, in order to either set up direct deposit or to opt out entirely, you (AND your spouse if you’re married filing jointly) have to (each) get an ID.me account.  Which seems kind of sketchy– you have to give your social security number and everything on your drivers license or passport to a third party.  If Trump were in office I would be 100% certain that this was a scam to get our personal information.  Their terms of use say they don’t sell it and they’re only providing the info to the IRS, nobody else.  Hopefully that’s true and they don’t get hacked and the people who work there are trustworthy…

DH went through and got pictures of his drivers license, then when their software couldn’t find his face, he cropped the sides of the picture so only the license was showing.  That seemed to work.

For me, I didn’t have any problems with uploading pictures or it finding my face, but at the end they said they didn’t believe I was who I said I was and I would have to show additional documents and talk with a live person.  First it let me try again with my passport, but that still didn’t work.

Once I got to all that, it put me on web-hold and when I got to 1 minute it started asking me every 10 seconds if I was still there.  After me pressing that button 6 times, it took me to a video screen.  Every few seconds it would tell me that I was waiting for the conference host to join and if I was the conference host to entire my conference number.

The conference host never joined.

Eventually I went back to the previous page and reloaded and it took me to a new video screen (the old one was still going, but I muted it) and a person showed up right away.

He took my information and a bunch of webcam pictures of my documents and me and I was able to login to the IRS page to say no thank you please hold my quarter of the child credit back with DH’s quarter and the half you’re already keeping.

I get that spreading the money out now is likely good for lower income folks, but what a hassle for the people who neither need nor want it!

Would you prefer to get your tax refund doled out in advance over the year or all at once when you file?  Or are you like us and usually paying estimated taxes?

On the new era of Fragrance: A tiny rant

Several of the men in my department have started smelling increasingly floral.  Like there’s a miasma of chemical fragrance wafting like a cloud around them.  My nose starts to drip when they come near.

On the plane the woman in front of me sprayed a bunch of perfume on herself before getting off.  I dripped and sneezed and dripped.

DC2 had skin trouble with the handsoap we usually buy, so DH replaced our bathroom handsoap with liquid ivory, because he got ivory and dove mixed up (dove is dermatologist recommended– they’re both old brands with white bottles and similar packaging).  I stopped being able to go near his face for half a day after he shaved, or my nose would drip and my eyes would start to water.

Then the grocery store stopped carrying his unscented head and shoulders, and they increased the fragrance in the suave he used to buy before he started trying to attack his dandruff.

We spent quite a bit of time at the grocery store today sniffing various shampoos.  He did find a mint scented one that didn’t cause any allergic reaction for me, but in the end everyone decided that DC2 and DH and I would all use the unscented Burt’s Bees baby shampoo that I switched to a while back.   (I started having dandruff and scalp itchiness problems with regular shampoo and decided to buy a bunch of different expensive unscented baby shampoos from Target– Burt’s Bees has been great.  I won’t say it gives me much in the way of volume or body etc, but my scalp feels fine, I have little dandruff, and … I only need to wash my hair about once per week now, which is crazy.)

I was so happy during the last decade or so when scents were out.  The bath and body works era before then was hellish– if I got around too many people or the wrong people I would get a drippy nose and a headache.  I frequently ran out of tylenol allergy sinus.

But now it seems like fragrances are back in, and they’re in EVERYTHING.  Even products we’ve used for years have started upping their scent.

I hate it.

Thank goodness for Zyrtec.  But I will be happy when this fad goes away.

Feel free to commiserate, fellow allergy sufferers!

RBOC

• Another unexpected death this year… Werner Troesken passed away last September and I just found out. I feel like I was just talking to him about being interviewed by reporters about Flint.  (He’s an economic historian with an amazing book on the effects of lead solder in water pipes.  Other fantastic books about segregation etc. as well.)  People are dying too young.  I had never met Devah Pager or Alan Krueger (though I have read so many articles by both and had seen Krueger give talks), but Werner I knew and liked as a person.
• It’s a little weird seeing old “faces” on the internet and remembering when everyone was saying, “NOooooo do not do that stupid thing with your money”… and then they did anyway, and now the thing that everyone said could happen did happen and the person is in bad shape because of it.  I think it’s more sad than schadenfreude, but also, do not do stupid things with your money.  And don’t be a jerk when you ask people for their advice and don’t like what they say.
• DC2 fractured hir wrist in two places falling off the monkey bars.  :(
• One of the things I hate about being a woman is how journal editors and occasionally referees will use any even marginally related previously done paper as evidence that the paper I’ve submitted is not novel.  Even if all it does is use a related novel technique looking at a completely different question.  Or uses the same dataset for a completely different literature.  When I’m refereeing guys papers that never ever gets said by the other referees (or me).  It’s like the initial assumption is let’s find any reason to reject, even a flimsy one.  It’s such a hard bar to pass.  Women’s papers have to be more than perfect.  I see this in refereeing all the time and it’s so unfair.  I hate it when it happens to me.  And big name guys can submit stuff that does the most minimal of lit reviews and provide no spec checks and somehow their stuff gets sent out and negative referee reports often get overruled.  It is just unfair.  And I’m not good enough to get over that hurdle.  I can’t get the line just right.  I put so many checks in footnotes.  And it takes me forever to do all the checks I need to put in in order to get the paper not rejected by an editor and to get the writing so it is concise but also contains enough material while also not having so much people overlook things (I have not managed this balance yet for all reviewers), and by the time I’ve done that, someone else has published something marginally related, and that’s enough of a reason not to accept what I’ve done.  So why did I bother in the first place?  And when the paper is finally accepted, there’s enough cut out to publish a second paper in another journal.  Though it has to be a lower quality journal because, of course, I already used that dataset or looked at a different subset or whatever.  FML.
• our local library’s opening has been delayed until September.  Apparently the city counsel delayed ordering furniture and are now at the end of the furniture buying queue behind all the school districts.

How do I adult?

I went to the grocery store. Now I have to cook, UGH. While I was at the grocery store, I wasn’t cleaning the bathroom or calling my mother or reviewing an article.

All I want to do is read books all the time when I’m not at work. Just because I have SO MANY great books and reading books is awesome and fun.

Now I need to go buy cat food and pick up a package but first I have to sit in this chair for 8 hours.

How do you adult?

“Pretending” to be a Darth Vader husband is not cool or funny.

There’s this personal finance blogger who often “pretends” to be a jerk to his wife.  It’s a running gag with him and he puts in her commentary as editors notes.

For one of these he spent the entire post complaining about how much laundry she does.  It read very much like a painful other side of a captain awkward post.  So in the comments I told him it wasn’t funny, and explained why.

Two days later we got a bunch of blog hits from him mocking me for calling him Darth Vader (which I didn’t—I was explaining why that humor isn’t funny in the context of Captain Awkward).  Turns out he elevated my comment to a post, twisted it, and accused me of reading incomprehension because he didn’t understand I was complaining about his failed attempt at humor.

So, in short, “pretending” to be a jerk to your wife in a public forum isn’t funny.  Back in the day more people probably thought Ralph Cramden’s  repeated line from the honeymooners about sending his wife Alice to the moon with a punch right in the kisser was funny.  Now we are less likely to laugh about threatened spousal abuse.  I hope that one day doods like this guy will stop their controlling husband shtick because nobody finds controlling husbands acceptable anymore.  Until then, these kinds of posts further the patriarchy by making the unacceptable seem acceptable.  And that’s really not funny at all.

Scalzi says the failure mode of clever is asshole, and misogynistic humor fits right in there.  Even if the woman is “in” on the joke.

In which #1 ends up singing about Dunning Kruger Homesteaders

#2:  My FIL watches a reality television show where this guy from Alaska goes around and saves people who tried homesteading but are doing a horrible job at it

#1: I’ve seen commercials for that. It makes me want to laugh in Schadenfreude.

#2: He recounted one of the episodes with a TSTL* couple for us. It was a bit astonishing. They’d planned like Pa Ingalls, which his to say not at all.  [*too stupid to live]

#1: I have spent enough time on a farm to know the daily slog is NOT for me.  (I hope they get Lyme disease) [ed:  not really]

#2: Even if they’d been doing everything perfectly, their land wasn’t big enough to homestead on, and they were not doing anything right. I don’t understand people who would want to homestead. It takes up so much space and it’s so much labor. Economies of scale! Comparative advantage! Efficiency! Gains from trade!

#1: I mean, you CAN build your own house but you should be some sort of engineer first. And some sort of agricultural specialist. And an herbalist. And a veterinarian. And, and, and….
“Flush toilets exist but we’d rather play house in the backyard until we die of dysentery.”
Let’s make soap! First, lye…(ugh, lye soap)
When ur animals inevitably die, you can boil their hooves for glue….
Also, I wonder if they know what poison oak looks like…
Did you know that goats can get polio and pigs can get rickets? If not, u shouldn’t be homesteading….

#2: How do you know so much about homesteading?

#1: I watch a lot of shows about veterinarians in rural areas.
If you have cows, you gotta know the right (and wrong!) way to pull a calf out alive.
Can you properly sterilize and stitch a wound? If not, don’t homestead. Can you set a simple broken bone? If not, don’t homestead.

*whistles nonchalantly off to my appliance-equipped kitchen*

Also if you hire labor, you’d best know your tax law!

*whistles another tune about rabies and tetanus combined*

This song goes, “Would you like to drain an abscess in an animal’s hooooooof?”

dum de dum, giardia doot de doo….

Ask the grumpies: What is real when it comes to nutrition advice?

Sandy L. asks:

Nutrition advice. What is real. I find it hilarious that eggs and coconut oil were such villains in the 90s and now they are “the perfect food”. I bought an old cookbook a few months back and it was talking about avoiding coconut oil. It made me laugh.
Now fat is okay but sugar is bad.

First, a tiny rant from #1, “In which research on “nutrition” is nonsense.”:

#1: haha: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3793920/

#2: People underestimate how much they eat?

#1: People write articles based on stupid, meaningless data and then use those articles to influence policy recommendations.

#2: The nhanes is the best information we have for a lot of things.

#1: It’s true. But the nutrition stuff is messed up. When asked how they eat, people misreport. Then the researchers convert the amount of various foods into calorie amounts, using incorrect databases that are filled with wrong info. Then they change methodology. Then reports are based on those data…

Most of the nutrition database info (about how many calories are in the reported food intake) hasn’t been actually checked scientifically.

For example, on the plane I had some beef. What cut was it? I have no idea. But different cuts of beef can have TWICE as much kcal as another cut. Which one do they write down? it’s kind of random!

It’s a good thing our policy is so coherent… oh wait…

People should also read Dances with Fat.

Enjoy, Grumpeteers!

#2 notes that you may be interested in reading this article about the history behind sugar and nutrition .  A bunch of people in high school had/got to read a book about the vast Sugar conspiracy for their world history class at our high school back in the 1990s.  It had some pretty horrifying stuff in it about sugar and tea and trade.  The capitalist conspiracy is ancient and vast!  The sugar dynasty is powerful and has been for centuries.

But…. there’s also non-political-economy reasons we don’t know a ton about nutrition.  The first is that nutrition is incredibly complex and there’s a lot of heterogeneity so it’s just hard to tease things out.  Generally, we start with looking at correlational evidence from places like the Framingham nurse’s study.  Those correlations provide headlines about eggs being bad when it may actually be the nitrates from bacon (eaten with eggs) or a million other things.  But correlations are a good place to start when you’re trying to figure out how things work because it narrows down the testing frame.  Then after correlational studies we can move into animal trials or human trials.  Generally that’s when things don’t pan out– there really wasn’t anything wrong with eggs, so randomized controlled trials failed to find anything wrong with eating eggs.  There was correlation but not causation.

What is real?  Who knows!  It seems likely that eating whole grains and unprocessed food and getting fiber and nutrients is a good thing.  But maybe not for everyone and maybe not to extremes.  I’m interested in seeing where all the research on gut flora ends up going.  (And, TBH, I’m really interested in getting better smelling underarm flora…)  Should you drink milk or eat meat?  Who knows!  Me, I generally listen to what I’m craving and pay attention to how I feel after.  That doesn’t always steer me right– sometimes I lose my ability to comfortably digest say, beef or raw veggies and that ability has to be rebuilt, but it’s the best idea I’ve got.

 

(Mis-)Adventures in trying to get a whole house water filter.

I’m allergic to the water in our area.  If I take a bath or the shower filter wears out, I end up with super-flakey skin and sometimes it itches.  Generally we handle this with a shower filter in the master shower and a sink filter for drinking water in the kitchen.  But then I started getting an itchy spot on my back where one of my bra straps hits (sort of on the right side), and we thought maybe instead of a blemish (there’s no bumps) or some kind of neurological problem it might be me becoming allergic to cloth, specifically the water it’s washed in (we’ve already narrowed down laundry soaps I can use).  I’m not convinced that the itchy spot is from the water, but we figured this was something to try.  Add to that that DC2 seems to have inherited a lot of my skin allergies, and the praise one of my colleagues who is allergic to chlorine gives his whole house water filter, we decided this was worth trying.

In fact, we decided it was worth trying back this summer when DH started getting paid again.  (This was our celebratory purchase.)  We decided it so much that I ended up buying a whole house water filter on “60%” sale from aquasana off amazon (quotes because it’s always on at least a “40%” sale).  From online searching, we determined it would probably cost another $700 -$1K to get the thing installed, and we were fine with that.

We still don’t have whole house filtered water.

My colleague had told us it was so easy.  They just hook up to the waterline and put it in your garage, he said.

My colleague does not have a corner lot where the garage is on the other side of the house (with the pipes imbedded in the concrete slab under the house).  There is no real feasible way to put the filter in the garage.  It has to be attached where the waterline comes into the house.

So we had the plumbers out and they said first we’d have to find the water line, which they could do but they didn’t have the specialized equipment so that would mean digging up a good portion of the lawn searching for it.  So they recommended a service who doesn’t do plumbing but just finds leaks.  That guy found our water line… and a leak (a real leak– that part of the lawn was definitely much greener than the rest of the lawn, we just hadn’t noticed).

So we had the plumbers out again to fix the leak.  Our home water pressure improved noticeably.  They still needed to get back to us on the cost of installation of the water filter.

Then weather happened and the plumbers couldn’t do non-emergency stuff for a while.

Then school happened and we didn’t have time to contact the plumber.

Then our sprinkler system started leaking, so we had to have a new sprinkler repair person out.

Then some hose connections started leaking (at which point we began to suspect that the increased pressure was busting out wherever it could bust) and we had the plumbers out again and they were able to get us an estimate on the whole house filter while they were out.

Then we accepted the estimate and made an appointment.

Then the two plumbers who were supposed to come out couldn’t because one had a wife in the hospital and one had a baby in the hospital (both emergencies, though with the baby it was a preemie so not entirely unexpected and the prognosis and eventual outcome was good).

Then they rescheduled for the next week when I was out of town for a conference.  They came out and fixed another hose connection thingy.

Upon further inspection, they realized that the hot water closet didn’t have enough room for both the water heater already housed there and the whole house water filter and told DH to get a shed.  DH took the day off work and went out and purchased a $300 ugly grey plastic shed and spent $30 on truck rental to get it home.  Then he put it together.  Then he realized he’d need a concrete floor or something to use it for the filter.  Then he realized the plumbers wouldn’t be coming back that day.  Then he realized the shed violated our HOA agreement.  [Update:  he has since resold the shed on Cragislist and so is only out $130, not $330, and we no longer have the ugly thing in our backyard waiting for the HOA to notice it.]

After much discussion, we decided to contact the HOA architectural committee for advice.  They didn’t give advice (the helpful lady had stepped down and was replaced by a guy who spent a long time explaining to DH why rules are important) but they gave us a horrifically lengthy and detailed document we would have to fill out if we wanted to get a shed (only wood are allowed, and boy are they pricey and difficult to find as small as we would want).

Then Thanksgiving happened.  Then Christmas happened.  And today is New Year’s.

So now we have three options which may or may not work.

1.  (The one we’re leaning towards):  Install the filter without the pro kit (looks something like this but is 10-year, not 6-year).  This cuts the width from ~44 in to ~22 in and might allow it to share the outdoor closet with our water heater.  We don’t know yet and would have to have the plumbers out again.
2. Remove our tanked water heater (which is going to have to be replaced in a year or two anyway) and replace it with a tankless water heater.  Then install the entire filter.  This should be possible, but it may cost another $2K, one K for the tankless water heater, another $1K for installation.  We have to do more research on this.  If money were no option, we’d be in the ideal situation for tankless as this water heater services two bathrooms and nothing else (meaning if we all took showers and baths at the same time we’d only be using 8 gallons max) and we’re in a warm climate.   Apparently the installation of tankless water heaters could be difficult or could be easy depending on where the hookups are and how big the tubes are.  Some newer tankless heaters have more standard hookups than did older models.  But we have to figure out which is which.  (Our garage water heater replacement will be another tank because we like running the dishwasher and clothes washer at the same time.)
3. We could keep trying to get a shed just for the water filter.

Am I wishing that I’d held off buying this filter?  YES.  Especially since my back hasn’t had that itchy spot for a while (it went away whenever I traveled, so right now my primary suspect is a different environmental allergen).  And the plumbers aren’t returning our calls.

We could cut our losses at this point and either try to return the filter at a loss or sell it on Craigslist at a loss.  But it would also be nice to take a bath from time to time without having to shower afterward (or regretting it later).

So I had hoped to have a happy post about how great whole house water filters are and how it’s changed my life etc…. but… instead I have this warning post about how corner lots and HOA suck and man, home improvement sure can suck away a lot of time and energy.

Have you ever gotten a whole house water filter?  How about a tankless water heater?  Any advice on getting a small (under 6 feet) wooden shed (and does it need a concrete bottom)?