Video Problem
There was a problem with the video yesterday.  It didn't work for PC users (most of the world)!  It should work better now for anybody who wants to try it, and let us know if there are any other problems.

Happy Birthday Daddy

Here's a little video from my [Michael's] birthday.  I took the video myself, in fact.  Having Becky sing the birthday song was pretty special!

Becky sings "Happy Birthday"!

Becky also put all 46 candles in my cake.  Nice job, isn't it? 

The Third Wednesday of the Month

If today is the third Wednesday of the month, it must be the day my second newspaper article appears.  Sure enough.  I noticed this time that my paragraphs were left intact, which makes the paragraphs appear long (for newsprint) but I think it keeps the writing more cohesive.

 

 

False Impressions

We have a new electric hot water tank plumbed in.  The work went along very nicely: removing the old oil boiler (damned heavy thing), cleaning the closet, plumbing the lines, and running some electricity over.  We had hot water by four in the afternoon of day two.

But there is no rest for the wicked.  I'm not sure what wickedness we're guilty of, but there must have been something.  On Tuesday night it became apparent that our refrigerator was no longer working, and after removing the rear access panel I [Michael] discovered that the compressor had given up.  What's worse is that it melted an electrical connector, which we then realized was the actual cause of the smoke in our house two days before.

So the heater was not the real culprit.

In hindsight it all makes sense, of course.  At the moment we started smelling smoke our initial impulse was to blame the heater, which has a history of giving us trouble.  It did strike both of us as odd that the smoke was concentrated in the kitchen rather than in the hall beside the heater closet.  It was also peculiar that the smoke didn't register on our carbon monoxide detector.  Lastly, it seemed odd that the floor in front of the fridge was not warm.

 At the moment of crisis, none of that mattered.  The heater had lately taken to shutting down and waiting for a human to reset it (it had done so earlier that morning).  The smoke filled the house at the same time the heater fired off.  I had repositioned the pickup tube in the oil tank four days prior, and so the possibility of picking up something off the bottom of the tank that could affect the heater was also a prospect.  There was also the simple logic that when I turned off the heater the smoke cleared and the house didn't burn down, and the false impression set in that the heater must have been the cause.

 So we bought a new refrigerator yesterday.  Nobody in this town works on refrigerator compressor systems, so replacing the compressor was not an option (which really irks both Sheryl and I to have this huge monolith that now needs to go to the landfill).  The unit we bought has a Crosley name plate on it, but apart from the name and a little bit of trim, the fridge is exactly the same as the one we took out (a Kenmore).   We even used a couple of shelves from the old unit to augment the ones in the new one.  The really funny thing is that the Crosley was less money that the new Kenmore of the same type (by a couple hundred dollars), and the Crosley carries a ten year warranty on the compressor compared to a one-year warranty for the Kenmore (the Kenmore did have an optional five-year extended warranty for an additional four hundred dollars).

All in all, everything worked out okay.  There were some fish sticks that did not survive the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle, but the rest of the food seems to have made it intact.  The only thing we really lost was the ability to burn the remaining eighty gallons of oil in our underground tank, but a friend who looked at the old heater after it was out proclaimed it unsafe on a couple of counts (and he's had some experience with oil burners), so decommisioning it when we did was not a bad thing to do, even if it was just a little premature.

Starting the Heater Project

It isn't a pretty picture, is it?  This is the closet that once housed our oil heater.  Yesterday morning we started smelling nasty, sooty smells, and seeing wisps of smoke, and Sheryl started bundling up the children to herd them out the door.  By the time they were ready to go I [Michael] had decided that the culprit was our old oil heater, and our great heater project had begun.

By the time Sheryl returned home the heater was ready to come out of the closet.  It is sitting on our front porch right now, in fact.  By late afternoon we had cold running water again (the two pipes in the picture are cold water in and hot water out, the valves were salvaged from the previous plumbing in the closet).  By midnight I had the hallway floor cleaned (oil heat is very dirty) and the intial cleaning of the closet floor complete (but as you can see, it is still quite black).

Today we'll get a new electric hot water tank and get it temporarily wired in (our final heater design calls for a tank anyway) so we can take showers and baths again.  It's a little cool in the house this morning (60 in our bedroom), but could do without central heat until September if we have to, and we may very well have to, since it's going to take some time to get everything else cobbled together.  Not exactly how I envisioned beginning this project, but these are really pretty good circumstances considering that the old heater could have done this back in the depths of winter.

Well, lots of work to do.