Owning a home is a great privilege and blessing. But most good things tend to come with some less-than-desirable baggage. All worldly possessions require some degree of cleaning, fixing, maintaining, or preserving (which sometimes makes me wonder why we always want more).
Anyways, today I changed one of the air intake filters to our heating/air conditioning ducting. Here’s what the new filter looks like:

Here’s a picture of the one I removed:

Nasty. It’s no wonder that we’ve all been caughing and sneezing so much.
The packaging suggested that these filters should be replaced every 3 months, but I was pretty sure this one was over due by a few days. Whoever installed this old one did fill in the date when it was installed, but it left me a bit confused:

After a bit of thinking I concluded that this old filter was installed way back when dates were still in the single digits. Definitely over 3 months ago.