Years ago, I got one of the usual Christmas Poinsettas and much to Carol's dismay, did not discard it at the end of the season. Each year, I move it into a dark corner of the basement for a couple months, then bring it into the light for spring.

Each year I have lovely red Easter blossoms.

What I haven't figured out how to do is prune the bush, so it's long and gangly and Carol referred to it as a "Charlie Brown Poinsetta."

A few years ago, I had two Charlie Brown Poinsetta's, but I tried an aggressive pruning on one, and it was embarassed to death at this bad-hair day. Literally to death.

That's why I'm leary about giving the remaining bush a trimming.

I could buy a new poinsetta, of course, but what would be the fun of that?

Shortly after we built this house a friend gave us an Amarillis. These also like to take a nap for a few months in the fall/winter.

These plants are very forgiving. They've let me repot them and they survived, and I even split off one of the daughter-bulbs and that survived.

Carol liked flowers, so she bought flowering plants fairly often. She killed these almost as often as she bought them, but the orchids and the mystery plant are pretty forgiving.

Aside from flowers, there's noises...

I was calmly reworking my chapter on Regular Expressions when the house reverberated with painful, agonized moans, the likes of which have not been heard since Jacob Marley convinced Ebenezer Scrooge to open his change purse.

My first thought was that a robot was dieing in great distress. So, I raced for the bedroom, proceeded by Caz who felt obliged to make sure the area was safe for humans, barking loudly to scare away any monsters that might be hiding under my bed, and thus making it harder to track down the source of the agonies.

The robot was quite happily cleaning. The source of the moans turned out to be a decade-or-so old air filter.

Years ago, Holmes made a line of air filters that all took the same size filter - the small ones used one filter, and the larger ones used four or five.

This was a nice design - keep one stock of filters in the basement and I'm ready.

All new air filters use custom sized filter that fits nothing else.

So, resurecting the loudly unhappy filter was preferable to replacing it.

Handymen know that repairs fall into one of two categories:

It moves and it shouldn't - Use Duct Tape. It doesn't move and it should - Use WD-40.

Deciding that this was a job for WD-40 was easy. Getting the WD-40 where it was needed was trickier.

Many, many screws (both phillips and flat) later, I was down to just the four bolts that hold the electric motor together.

The first three bolts were easy, but while the first cut is the deepest, the last bolt is the hardest. I managed to strip the phillips head into a smooth cone, and finally had to resort to a trick I haven't needed to use since 1979. I filed the two edges of the screw head flat and grabbed it with a crescent wrench. I ended up removing the bolt 1/8 of a turn at a time.

I also ended up replacing that bolt. Luckily I had a good-enough (flat-head instead of phillips) bolt in stock.

As expected, the oil in the bearings had transmogriied into bubble gum. I cleaned the bearings with some WD-40, then oiled them with the Viet Nam War era weapon's lube I picked up at an Army Surplus place back in the '70s. This is good stuff - designed to keep an M-16 working in a swamp.

It took almost 90 minutes to dis-assemble the filter. About 10 to clean and re-oil the motor, then another 20 to re-assemble it.

I ended up with a few screws left over. The engineers obviously over-specified how many screws were needed to keep this thing together. I suspect they owned stock in a screw factory.

But with the carefully considered conclusion that it didn't need all those screws to begin with, I turned it on. No smoke, no flames and no nasty snap-crackle-pops. It's working better than it's run in over a decade.

Caz patiently watched this entire operation. I'm not sure that watching someone work counts as being a working breed.