Wheeee, I got me a brandsy new one!

It's called an oxygen concentrator and is the machine that keeps me going on a daily basis. What it does is convert and concentrate the available oxygen in the air, and feeds it into my body through a nasal cannula attached to a 50 foot cord that I drag around with me throughout the house. That's a bit of an over-simplification, it's a little more complicated, but you get the general idea.

Now, trust me when I tell you, except for that necessary breathing stuff, it's nothing to get real excited about, okay? In actuality, it's a real pain in the arse. Not only because I'm attached to it with that cord, which limits how far I can go without changing where it's located, but also because of the noise it emits. It runs 24/7, and every minute or so lets out a puff of air with a whooosh sound attached to it. The more hours it runs and the older it gets, the louder it becomes, just as a general fact of machinery operating non-stop over a period of time.

In the normal course of my day, I don't hear it too much. It lives in an empty bedroom (when we don't have company, otherwise in the garage or laundry room) upstairs, and I spend a good bit of my time downstairs in the family room with the TV, computer, my scrapping stuff, the fireplace, laundry room, etc. Nightimes, however, are a different story.

The bedroom it lives in is directly across from our bedroom. Hence, I can hear the thing merrily huffing and puffing away while it does its job. That, combined with Lew's snoring, and I have super Dolby stereophonic surround sound... and the overwhelming urge to kill! Luckily, the concentrator noise is dramatically muffled by closing the extra bedroom door. Would that it were that simple to muffle Lew!

So now, after bending your ear... or in this case, straining your eyes...with this mega-long tale, I'll get to the whole point of this entry. My oxygen guy delivered a brand new machine today. The old one was due for maintenance and he rolled it right on out the door. The new one only has 3 hours of testing time on it. It almost purrs like a kitten! Even the "gasp" doesn't sound as loud. Oh joy, peace and quiet! Or quieter, anyway.