variousness

[mamajoan]

hee hee, Isaac was so funny this morning when grandma came to pick him up. Until she arrived, he was excited but restrained. But as soon as she showed up he was bouncing off the walls. Usually no matter how much he wants to go wherever we're going, he still puts up a token protest about putting on his coat -- not today! He grabbed it out of my hands and threw it on. LOL! It's been a whole, let's see, FIVE DAYS since he last rode on the subway. The Horror! :D

Update on my brother and sister-in-law on their trek: It seems to be going well and they're on schedule to arrive here sometime tomorrow. metafrantic lost his wallet in a Walmart parking lot somewhere in Oklahoma, but it was found by a Walmart employee, and they called his bank (the number on the bank card in his wallet) and got his phone number and called him, the upshot of which is, they're mailing it to him here. I swear, my brother leads a charmed life. :)

Tomorrow I have what I very much hope will be my last ultrasound. If my cervix is still looking good and the baby is fine, which I certainly expect will be the case, then they may (according to what they told me last time) say that I can stop having ultrasounds every four weeks. I hope so, because it is a frickin' pain in the ass, just logistically speaking. They don't do ultrasounds on Thursdays, the day I work from home, so it has to be either a Wed or Fri each time, which means either finding someone to watch Isaac and then taking him to daycare late, or taking him to daycare and then going to my appointment (i.e., doubling my commute, for a total of almost 100 miles driven in one day). The latter is what I'll be doing tomorrow, and as it's supposed to be rainy and possibly sleety/snowy, that sounds like a whole buttload of fun. grumble grumble ... So anyway, bottom line, here's hoping it all looks good tomorrow and the perinatologist decides to let me off the hook.

Someone on a parenting board sent me a private message saying that she dreamt that I had a baby boy and named him either Solomon or Simon. Solomon is Isaac's middle name, so I wonder if she knew that but had forgotten it except for subconsciously? Simon is on my list for Cosmo, although it's pretty far down, more in the "I suppose these names might be okay" section than the "definitely under consideration" section.

And in annoying household news, the pilot lights on my stove keep going out. Three times now in the last week or two. I don't know what this means, but if it involves paying someone a lot of money to fix it, I'm probably screwed.

Comments

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

You can frequently find a little knob near the pilot light's gas tube that adjusts how much gas is being fed to the pilot. Try adjusting this first before calling someone to come fix it for you. Otherwise, try swabbing out the end of the gas tube for the pilot light with a bit of alcohol. It might just be a bit dirty.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Alternately, spend $8 for the long-nosed lighters that people use for grills, and light your own pilot light. It's just a burner, right, not the oven? It sucks, but it works.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Weeeellll, but that wouldn't really solve the problem whereby it's leaking gas into my apartment and poisoning my children, would it?

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Most stoves have a cut-off whereby the gas doesn't flow if the pilot light isn't on--that is, if a sensor isn't hot enough. Not to mention that you would have to leave the burners on without lighting them, which I hope you don't do on a regular basis. If you turn on the burner and then light a match, does it light immediately? (Obviously, light the match right away or you could get a big ball of flame.)

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

hmm, I haven't tried the match thing, but I did notice that I don't smell gas until I turn the burner on. But the stove is like fifty million years old so I wouldn't trust it to have any fancy cut-off switches or anything like that. Isn't the pilot always emitting small amounts of gas to keep itself on? so it might not be enough to smell, but enough that if I let it go for weeks it'll poison us? Or am I just making stuff up now?

[mogwar.livejournal.com]

In the meantime, might it be worth having a carbon monoxide detector, perhaps in the kitchen?

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Tru, but if you have an actual pilot light and it is not working and you need a lighter each time you light the burner, this means that the rest of the time, when not in use, you are leaking a steady stream of GAS into your home. As someone who has had carbon monoxide poisoning, I really don't recommend this. Especially not if you have a child in the house. True, it may not seem like much, but it is still a gas leak none-the-less.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

You should obviously check it out, but again, newer stoves (by which I think I mean fifteen years? maybe more?) will have a shutoff when the pilot light isn't lit. The sensor will get cold, gas will not flow, you'll have to hold the match next to the pilot light for a while before the gas turns back on. You may be able to look up your stove's make and model online and see how old it is, or call the stove company.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Fifteen years! Dude, my stove is *at least* twice that old.

I tried googling the words shown on the front of the stove (Welbilt Jewel Digimatic, ha ha, like there's anything "digi" about this stove) and got nothing. Welbilt company doesn't even seem to exist any more. I can't even get an 800-number for the company that comes up at www.welbilt.com -- just a Florida number, and I'm not wasting a long-distance call on this, yeesh.

Solomon

[psu-jedi.livejournal.com]

Cary had this on his list of names, but it's not one I like for a first name. Turns out, I have a great-great-great grandfather with that name (maybe not 3 "greats," but far enough back that I didn't know it until my mom mentioned it), but it still wasn't enough to get me to put it on my list.

8 weeks, and we still haven't decided on a name...and I don't want to wait until the bris to name him!

Re: Solomon

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

I don't much care for it as a first name either, but I liked it as a middle name. I kept thinking "Isaac Samuel" but somehow it didn't seem *quite* right, and then the nurse told me I really needed to finish filling out the birth certificate form now ;) and Solomon popped into my head and voila.

I highly recommend getting at least a good shortlist of names ready well in advance! ;) It was another of the many things I thought I'd do in those last six weeks.... ;) Isaac was lucky he was a boy in that sense, because my so-called shortlist of girl names was even less ready than the boy name list. As it turns out, I'm very happy with the name I picked for him, but still it would have been nice to be a *little* more prepared. ;)