Potpourri.

[deep_time]

Lately I find myself longing to hike with other people. Usually I'm ambivalent at best about including other people in my trail plans; I only started venturing out with Egor back in 2012 because we could split travel costs. Egor hikes too fast on uphills but flags on the back half of especially long hikes, so he's basically my opposite when it

Comments

[veijukka]

Yikes! I hope your heater is fixed by now. This is a bad time to go without reliable heat/hot water. How old is your house? I've only lived in one old enough to be on oil.

[deep_time]

It's working for now, but I haven't tried a hot-water-guzzling activity like washing the dishes or doing the laundry since the last two outages. Last night I noticed that the gauge on the two oil tanks had gone from 3/8 full to just 1/8 full in a matter of two days. I shut down the heat, but the landlord was already asleep and not answering his phone. This morning he claimed that there had been a blockage between the two tanks, and that the sudden drop was a result of oil finally settling freely between the two tanks, one presumably drained dry while the other one -- the only one with a gauge -- remained at 3/8 full. I don't know if I believe him -- I doubt he would lie to cover his ass, but I don't believe he or his heater-repair buddy are necessarily competent. But I did turn the heat back on. If the "fixed" burner burns through that 1/8 tank overnight, we have a bit of a problem.

[mmmbrains]

I think this winter (at least around here) has been made way worse by the fact that the weather forecasters have very consistently gotten things wrong.  not even just long term, we're talking the same days forecast.  so frustrating.

[deep_time]

I use weather.gov, because I'm a nerd and local forecasters (and the Weather Channel) are a joke. But even so, winter weather is a lot harder to forecast than warm season weather. A tiny temperature difference can make a huge difference, as can a slight change in the moisture within the system.