Oh that is true but most of them have systems where you can attach tubes to the inputs and outputs and with enough redneck engineering (which is my upcoming plan once I finish a few other jobs) you can rig up a system to optionally either vent the cooled air outside or with a damper switch have it blow into the air intake of my AC system.

This is easier for me since my water heater is right next to the air intake for my HVAC system.

But, alternatively during the winter you have the option of switching over to traditional electric and even though that will negate the energy savings from the hybrid system it will prevent energy waste from cooling the air that you paid to heat.

It’s not that expensive but it’s also not inexpensive but I highly recommend that if you have to replace your hot water heater that you get a hybrid hot water heater, more so if you live in a warmer climate.

It is a win-win.

One, it is more efficient at warming your water, saving you money and ultimately paying for itself over time.

Two, it takes the coldness out of your water and blows it into the air of your home, saving you money on cooling your home.

Three, it will dehumidify your air, making the sweltering summer months all the more pleasant.

It will cost you approximately $1,000 more than a standard electric water heater of the same size, but if you live anywhere south of the midpoint of Colorado, it will pay for itself in energy savings in less than half of its lifetime and the savings after that point will pay for its replacement when its time is up.

I’m not 100% certain they would melt. And I’m not going to spend my own time and money to try to fix everything that’s wrong with them.

If you have an idea on a way to make them better, how about you implement them and then make millions of dollars selling them to ignorant rubes like myself?

They taste like candied styrofoam to me

Same. The instant it touches my tongue I’m transported back to being a kid and my grandmother thinking these were amazing treats and giving them out to us and then getting really upset if we didn’t finish them.

And then I remember I have to actually eat the rest of it. So I finish off the first one and then I see the tiny little 59 cent bag that’s only got four more of them in it and I feel like it would be a waste of my money and my effort in acquiring the circus peanuts and so I force myself to eat the rest of the bag and then vow to never eat them again.

Until I forget and get another bag.

Gave out a few full size snickers to adults today. Glad to have them come by!

How about circus peanuts?

The first bite of circus peanuts tastes to me like an alien artificial intelligence had to create a sugary treat and only had petroleum by-products to make it with.

The second bite tastes like accepting your fate.

Honestly it kind of sucks.

I always wanted a kid but it requires a partner who is able to be a parent and I have never had such a partner.

I had a pretty fucked up childhood and I wanted someone who could be a good mother to a child and everyone I’ve dated who had the ability to be a good mother was not capable of giving birth for one reason or another and everyone I’ve dated who’s capable of giving birth was not capable of being a good mother for one reason or another.

I know it’s not too late for me but it’s getting pretty damn close.

I probably go back to when I was a kid and my mom kidnapped me and since I look so much like my dad kick in the door and raise myself as my own father.

Use my knowledge of the future too make myself incredibly rich and give my younger self all of the advantages and opportunities of life.

I have a lot of vivid dreams, ranging from mad-dash musical romps through New York with a choir of choreographed nuns singing a song I’ve never heard before to epic space battles on a ship where in a laser sword battle I kill a knock off Vader that turns out to be my cousin.

My most memorable dreams are these:

1: First repeating dream:

In this dream I am standing naked on a platform hanging in infinite darkness. Leading away from that platform is a single silvery wire. I know I am supposed to tightrope walk across this to get away.

In the background, beyond vision, dozens of shadowy judges watch my every move.

I take my first step onto the wire. I take my second, and miss, and thanks to my failure I fall into the infinite darkness.

I hit the ground and in real life my body convulses, waking me from the dream.

2: 9/11 dream

This was a one-shot. On 9/11 my brother had his alarm clock set to the news. That morning I dreamed that cat aliens had crashed their flying saucer into the twin towers. I was there for some reason and the aliens asked me to help them get back before the various three-letter agencies catches them, which I agree.

To help us get there faster, I am given rocket skates and we zip through the streets of New York, (Always uphill for some reason, but the sparks and flames from the skates made it look really cool) as we attempt to get them back to the ship.

I woke up before the dream ended.

3: My most repeating dream:

I have a dream town. It’s a rural town, with acres between each of the buildings. It’s always morning in the late-spring here, beautiful countryside town with white buildings and smiling people, green, rolling hills and wooden fences.

I am in an old style 1950’s Chevy (with all the curves and wooden slats on the bed) light blue pickup truck driving sedately through the town, waving at my friends and associates who always smile and wave back.

Sometimes I see new buildings I’ve never seen before, or meet someone I’ve never met before, sometimes I am asked to fix things or to deliver vegetables for one of the farms, but everything is calm and beautiful and joyous in a way that doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. I’m always both happy and sad when I wake from these dreams.

4: Scary repeating dream:

This dream takes place in an area that seems like my dream town above, but it’s always trapped within the lawn of this scary house, which is my house, and it has many rooms and floors. It looks like a church from the outside, but not well maintained with chipping white paint and enough slightly rotted wood that anyone who lived there would say, “It’s time for me to replace these boards and re-paint this place”.

The house seems to be about two or three stories but it has a steeple, almost as if there is a full church build on top of a 1940s military town “four walls and a roof” style home.

I go into the house and the first and second floors are normal, but when you are on the stairs, there is a floor that can’t be reached up a long empty vertical chute, and that floor gives off bad vibes. Halfway up is a door with no stairs attached to it.

This door is always closed, and even if you shine a flashlight on it it stays dark.

Every time this house is in my dream, I am curious to explore what is behind the door, so I crawl up or get a ladder and somehow reach the door.

Approaching the door fills me with dread, as if something evil lurks there, and my heart beats harder and harder and I feel more terrified the closer I get to the door, as though something purely evil is watching my every breath with delicious anticipation.

Eventually the terror and pressure is too much for me and I wake up in a cold sweat.

Every time I have that dream it fucks with me for a few days. I don’t get scared at scary movies or startle easily, but that dream gets to me every time.

So yeah, sorry for the dump, I just have a lot of strong dreams that I remember.

I mean unless you’re sitting on an exabyte of spare storage you don’t know what to do with it’s a pretty hefty undertaking.

I feel like being spied on on the Internet is kind of like having a camera in your bathroom.

Sure they promise they’re only going to point it at the sink and just make sure that you’re engaging in proper toothbrushing habits.

Sure.

But they’ll set it at the point where the mirror shows the shower and the toilet and they’ve got smell detectors in there to determine how much food you’ve eaten and how well your digesting it and there’s a sensor in the toilet to check the content of your urine and then if you drink too much they’re going to tell your boss that you’ve been drinking because they detected the alcohol that your body flushed out in your urine when you peed.

And you have no control over who gets to see what’s going on in your bathroom.

It is morally wrong and psychologically oppressing to be spied upon.

And the powers that be are so focused on the benefits it gives them that they do not care about the negatives that affect us.

I’ve had the whole life flashing before your eyes thing.

The night I lost my virginity. Got high with this girl and watched a movie that was terrible and then we ended up hooking up and I’d put so much expectation into what sex was going to be like that when it actually came to it it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Couldn’t cum. So after doing everything I could possibly think of to do for about an hour I gave up and really shittily faked my orgasm and then I took the girl home.

Got back home and I blue balled myself so I took care of it and right after I came I had an epiphany. Being a kid and hyper sexualized I had messed around with my brother and sister, never going so far is actually having penetrative sex or anything but yeah. All of that shit flashed before my eyes and it hit me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

The stress was so much that every single bone in my rib cage right down my sternum cracked. It sounded like a gunshot had gone off. And it set my heart on fire with pain and misery and shame and guilt and an absolute detestation of my very existence that I that that I just I can’t express it it’s the only thing I understand in this universe to be “ineffable” is what I felt at that moment.

And I don’t know if it was a blessing or a curse.

I spoke to my siblings after I had recuperated some and apologized for my wrongdoing in our childhood and for the most part we worked all of that out but God damn. Like, I was not mentally prepared to get drop kicked in the soul on the same night that I lost my virginity.

There were other things going on at that time too. I had been writing poetry and sometimes when I would write poetry I would feel like this flash of fiery warmth and it’s like I would automatically know what the poem is going to be and it would flow out of me in this beautiful golden Rush.

I had books and books and books of poems I had written like this.

And I was attempting to write a poem when all of this happened and instead almost like I was possessed like it was automatic writing I wrote out all of my sins on several sheets of paper. My heart burned like someone had dropped an ember of burning hot coal on it as all of my sins were ripped out of me against my will.

It left me so shook that in all of the years since then I have only been able to kind of sort of cry a single time.

It felt like being abandoned by God, or rather it felt like suddenly getting caught by him and immediately thrown into hell for 5 minutes, only to be dragged back out with the fires still licking my skin from the inside and then being left to think about what I had done.

I’m talking about the bad side of it but there was a good side too because it opened my eyes to how I was living and what I was doing and even though I’m still horribly imperfect and terrified of being imperfect but helpless to not be imperfect, I am not as bad as I was I think.

And there were other times too where that same golden warmth would come up to me in the middle of a conversation and I would be talking to someone and all of a sudden I would know exactly what to say and in those moments where this would happen it’s like pleasure and joy and fire would rise up out of my heart and reach out to the other person and touch them and in those moments I know the words that I have said have made a positive impact on someone else’s life, but they weren’t my words, they were the words of this fire and spirit inside of me.

All these years later that fire still burns. It never stops. It cannot be forgotten for me. And no matter how many times I explain it, people just generally do not believe that this actually happened to me. They think that it is a mental break or a bit of psychosis or some self delusion that I have put myself under to deal with the trauma of the incest and unfettered sexual promiscuity of my childhood.

And sometimes I’m afraid that that event was my soul leaving my body. And sometimes I’m afraid that it was the sudden inrush of the inhabitation of God that I had been searching for.

And as far as I know no one else has ever felt the way I feel. I can’t find any literature on it. The closest I can relate to are those Christian iconographies of a heart with a crown on it and barbed wire and fire.

But you would think that if that was the inhabitation of God that the inclination to sin would have been driven away from me and yet I still sin just like everybody else.

So I don’t know. I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else. Just wish I could meet someone who had been through that and knew what it was and could guide me.

I had the same experience with the two towers. I can’t watch the movie of the two towers. And I can’t make it more than 60 or 70 pages into the book before my brain gives up and says they’ve been walking through the fucking Hills and talking to the trees for 30 pages this is some bullshit.

Maybe I’m cutting myself short by not pushing through but I just literally cannot build up the energy it takes to push through this wall of infinite text.

Yeah I finished the first book and put it down and said fuck this shit.

I enjoyed the suspense of wanting to see what would happen but then I realized that the author is a sadist who only wants the readers to suffer and that was enough to end the entire series for me. I got roped into watching the first episode of the first season and I was like oh it’s the entire first book in one hour fuck this shit and I’ve not watched anymore of it.

Indeed. When saltheart foamfollower undergoes the lava caamora? Like I don’t cry but that brought a tear to my eye.

There is a final four books out which are of a different caliber than the first six but not a terrible read.

I’d say the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas covenant the unbeliever was a wild trip.

In the story, Thomas covenant has leprosy. Due to the leprosy he is numb from the neck down even though he can still walk. He has no sensation when he touches anything and he cannot engage in his chosen profession which is writing. In a fit of pique he rescues a girl that almost gets hit by a car and gets isekaied.

This was written in the late '70s so it was not a common trope at the time.

He arrives in a world of magic on top of a mountain covered in Giant steps, he crawls his way down the mountain and encounters a girl who uses the magic of the land to heal him of his leprosy.

Believing this is all a dream and trying to prove to himself that this is not real, he rapes the girl.

The girls seems very distraught but pulls herself together and guides him into town and that is when he discovers that the white gold wedding ring on his finger is the source of wild magic.

There is a great evil on the land that plans to destroy everything and he is the chosen person, the only person who can stop it.

He has to fight against his disbelief of the world while reconciling his abhorrent actions with his own internal sense of morality in order to have a chance to go home again.

This book spawned a 10 book series covering hundreds of years of history in the land with Thomas Covenant’s battle with the forces of evil and the lives of the people of the land resting in his leprosy numbed hands.

It’s an amazing work but it is a rough read.

Nearly $400 might be a touch out of the price range, but thank you! At least I know that it exists so it’s worth keeping on searching.

Knowledge can be externally verified by an independent party.

Belief can be corroborated but not verified.

Does anyone know where I could find some 20-in wide charcoal filter cloth sponge material?

I would like to be able to have my filter reduce odor in the home as well but I can’t seem to find anything other than little 4-in strips.