The furnace quit on us last night. We called our plumbing/heating contractor, but (not surprisingly) they're booked with truly dire emergency cases through Monday.

The good news is that it seems to be working now (the inside temp was below 60 a few hours ago, according to starmalachite; it's now up to 62). Based on the pattern I observed last night (the pilot ( Read more... )

We had a very interesting drive (no real close calls, fortunately) home from Friday night gaming as the snowstorm (now projected to be somewhere around 2 feet and among the top-ten recorded winter storms) began. Now, we're set to hunker down at home for the next few days ( Read more... )

After cutting up part of the big tree branch that fell in the yard about a month and a half ago, I got to the bigger sections and decided to call in the pros to finish the job. I got a few bids, and the contractor I ended up hiring came by (after a one-day weather-related delay) to hack up and remove the remaining bits a few weeks ago.

Just ( Read more... )

A couple of the main branches from a tree in the common area next to our yard apparently got knocked down in a thunderstorm. Fortunately, it missed the house, and I actually didn't notice it until a neighbor pointed it out (I'm not much of an outdoor person, and that portion of the yard is away from the path in and out of the house ( Read more... )

After taking a look at the street in front of the house, and recalling the up-and-down hills on the bus route before it gets here (along with the fact that the bus never showed up at all last time after a smaller snowfall). I decided to call in and stay home ( Read more... )

Things accomplished over the last few days:

1. Install 8 GB microSD chips in our phones and transfer the files from the old chips. That ought to last a while, even with video clips.

2. Fix the furnace-closet door so that it closes properly (and stays closed when Basement Cat finds work for idle paws).

3. Rehab one of the old UPS/surge suppressor units ( Read more... )

Cox finally sent somebody who seems to have a clue -- after checking the signal strength, replacing some of the wiring in the attack, and rebooting the tuning adapter, he got everything working -- apparently, the TiVO setup cycle is more sensitive to signal cleanness than most video equipment. So far, so good ( Read more... )

Last week, our old stand-alone DVR/DVD recorder conked out. A bit of searching shows that the market for this sort of device seems to have dried up in favor of separate DVD recorders and DVR hard-disk units. We already had another DVD recorder (a DVD/VCR combo setup we keep in case we ever play video tapes or get around to transferring old ones to ( Read more... )

While checking inside the utility closet to see why the heat sputtered a bit, I noticed the light on the humidifier was signaling that it was time to replace the internal water panel (something that looks like a fiber sponge, apparently designed to disperse water where it can be picked up by the stream of warm air being blown into the house). The ( Read more... )

The furnace quit working the other day. At first, turning it off long enough to reset the system seemed to fix the problem, but it quit again and stayed quit.

The repair guy discovered that the gas igniter had failed, and the motor and bearings were giving out (explaining that it sometimes ran pretty loudly when first starting up). We decided to ( Read more... )