leaf blower, loose clothing

Someone left a thank you on an informational entry I posted over 5 years ago about the lint filter on my old washing machine. Yay, that's why I post those kind of things sometimes. To help anyone else who may encounter the same problems I did.

Today I used my lithium battery-powered leaf blower (Greenworks model 24282). Sometimes it sucks my clothes against the bottom side where it pulls air in. When that happens, I shift it further away from myself. But today it sucked in the drawstring on my pants, tore off a piece, and started making a bad noise. So I turned it off.

This evening I extricated the piece of drawstring that had gotten stuck inside the unit. After removing the nozzle, I could see the piece by looking in through the front of the unit with a flashlight. But it was stuck so tight that pulling on it with long tweezers and a long-necked pair of pliers wasn't able to get it free. So I opened the blower up. It has 13 screws on one side which hold the 2 halves of the housing together. After removing the screws, I couldn't get the halves apart at first. Finally I noticed there was a plastic warning sticker* under the handle, right over where the halves joined together. That was also holding them together. Cutting a slit down the middle of the sticker allowed the halves to came apart easily.

Pulling on the drawstring as I'd been doing before had gotten it stuck worse. It needed to be pulled out inwards from the center of the fan, rather than outwards. With the unit open, it was easy to do.

*One of the tiny icons on the sticker even warns against wearing loose clothing. Though without looking at the manual as I'm doing now, I wouldn't have been able to figure out that's what the icon represented. Another icon warns about long hair... yikes, that would be worse to get stuck. The blower is so light and easy to use (and unlike other tools, doesn't have any sharp blades; it only blows air!) that I hadn't thought of it as potentially dangerous.

..

Now I feel inspired to try fixing my dryer (I did once before already, so have an idea what the problem is). But starting to dismantle a dryer at 3am is not a good idea.

ticcatock tikkatock

When I accidentally open the same video in 2 browser windows with a slight delay between them, it usually sounds weird. Sometimes it sounds really good.

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Part of that video I still want to post was a real example of me talking to myself while working from home. It amused me, listening to myself talking to myself.

Today I worked from home again, and talked to myself a lot again. I wonder why I do it out loud. Do I like to hear myself? Is it because the room sounds too quiet? Does it soothe me? Does it make me feel like I have a companion?

Often, I'll take on 2 personas while doing it. One, frustrated or discouraged about something, whiny, mopey. The other, practical, optimistic, offering solutions, giving me pep talks. "You can do it!" is something I say to myself a lotttttttttttt.

But a lot of the time, it's simply me verbalizing what I'm doing or what I'm about to do. There doesn't seem any reason to speak that out loud, yet I do it. I also verbalize things I'm feeling: "I'm hungry; I'm tired; my foot hurts; I'm cold enough now, time to turn off the A/C; etc."

When I'm at work in the office with other people around, do I have the same monologue, just inside my head instead of out loud? I'm not sure. I don't know if my thoughts, at least while working on computer stuff, even make it into words when I don't speak them out loud.

Right now, I'm not talking out loud. I'm only thinking these words in my head as I write them.