One monster after another
Nov. 30th, 2005 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerLast night, our furnace quit working. It would kick on, blow for about five minutes, and then the blower would suddenly shut off although we could hear the furnace going click...click....click... like it was trying to ignite itself. If we shut it off for five minutes and then turned it back on, it would kick in again, for a few minutes, then die again. We called Minnegasco (we have this service plan that gets us free furnace repairs). We talked to someone who thought it would be reasonable to schedule service for next Monday. Apparently you only qualified for an immediate visit if you had no heat, and we had heat...right? I told him that no, it was broken, the temperature was falling, and we needed someone right away. (It was 17 degrees out last night. We've had the furnace go out when it was below zero, but thank goodness, that time we were able to get a repair person to our house by 2 a.m.) He told us someone would come tomorrow. It's an "all-day appointment," which means I need to be within 15 minutes of coming home to let the service guy in alllllllllllllll day. This should make our normally stressful and hectic Wednesday even more fun.
It was kind of disturbing to listen to the click...click...click, and it wasn't working anyway, so we shut off the furnace before going to bed, piling blankets on every bed. The house fell to 54 degrees overnight, but when Ed got up and turned the furnace back on, it kicked in and stayed on, heating the house up to 65 by the time I got out of bed and our usual 68 by the time I got downstairs. It now seems to be working normally. We still have the appointment with the furnace repair person; I'm hoping the problem is still diagnosable.
While getting dressed this morning I noticed that Garaji was batting something around in the study. Turned out she had a mouse. So I shut the study door, went downstairs to get tongs and a pot, came back up, grabbed the still-twitching barely-alive rodent with the tongs, dropped it in the pot, praised Garaji for her prowess as hunter, and then disposed of the mouse. I had a mouse incident last year in which Garaji dropped the mouse at my feet because she wanted me to fix her new toy (it had stopped moving! no fun!) and then ran away when I screamed and refused to come back to finish it off. I dumped the trash out of my study trash can, put it over the mouse (I was afraid it would regain consciousness and run away), weighted it, and then had to figure out how the hell to get the mouse out from under the trash can and out of the house without it escaping. (And no, no one else in the house was going to deal with it for me. Like many couples, we have a certain division of labor when it comes to vermin in the house. Rodents are my job. Well, and Garaji's. I will note that on two occasions in the last nine years, I have thought I saw or heard a mouse, and both times, Garaji has killed it less than twenty-four hours later. And this time, she was smart enough not to bring it to me for repairs while it was still showing signs of life.)
As a random aside: I've also been smelling this odd smell in the house for the last couple of days. Most of the time, it smells faintly of wood smoke or burned toast. I can never tell where it's coming from, though there are certain spots where the smell is more distinctive. I have also occasionally smelled wood smoke outside, usually on warmer days. My operating theory is that we're smelling a neighbor's wood-burning stove; that the smoke drifts in from outside when the house is open and we smell it more strongly inside than out because smells are more discernible when it's warm. The weirdest thing is that several times I swear I have smelled Malt-O-Meal being made. (Malt-O-Meal is made in Northfield, Minnesota, where I went to college. The smell was reminiscent of slightly burned popcorn. It was probably the defining odor of my college years, though sometimes the wind changed and we smelled the turkey farm or the sewage treatment plant instead, which wasn't nearly as pleasant.) The really dangerous furnace-related gases are natural gas (and I know the smell of a gas leak -- this isn't it) and CO, which is odorless (and we have a detector). So it's probably not related, but who knows. Given this week so far, I figure I should consider all possibilities.
It was kind of disturbing to listen to the click...click...click, and it wasn't working anyway, so we shut off the furnace before going to bed, piling blankets on every bed. The house fell to 54 degrees overnight, but when Ed got up and turned the furnace back on, it kicked in and stayed on, heating the house up to 65 by the time I got out of bed and our usual 68 by the time I got downstairs. It now seems to be working normally. We still have the appointment with the furnace repair person; I'm hoping the problem is still diagnosable.
While getting dressed this morning I noticed that Garaji was batting something around in the study. Turned out she had a mouse. So I shut the study door, went downstairs to get tongs and a pot, came back up, grabbed the still-twitching barely-alive rodent with the tongs, dropped it in the pot, praised Garaji for her prowess as hunter, and then disposed of the mouse. I had a mouse incident last year in which Garaji dropped the mouse at my feet because she wanted me to fix her new toy (it had stopped moving! no fun!) and then ran away when I screamed and refused to come back to finish it off. I dumped the trash out of my study trash can, put it over the mouse (I was afraid it would regain consciousness and run away), weighted it, and then had to figure out how the hell to get the mouse out from under the trash can and out of the house without it escaping. (And no, no one else in the house was going to deal with it for me. Like many couples, we have a certain division of labor when it comes to vermin in the house. Rodents are my job. Well, and Garaji's. I will note that on two occasions in the last nine years, I have thought I saw or heard a mouse, and both times, Garaji has killed it less than twenty-four hours later. And this time, she was smart enough not to bring it to me for repairs while it was still showing signs of life.)
As a random aside: I've also been smelling this odd smell in the house for the last couple of days. Most of the time, it smells faintly of wood smoke or burned toast. I can never tell where it's coming from, though there are certain spots where the smell is more distinctive. I have also occasionally smelled wood smoke outside, usually on warmer days. My operating theory is that we're smelling a neighbor's wood-burning stove; that the smoke drifts in from outside when the house is open and we smell it more strongly inside than out because smells are more discernible when it's warm. The weirdest thing is that several times I swear I have smelled Malt-O-Meal being made. (Malt-O-Meal is made in Northfield, Minnesota, where I went to college. The smell was reminiscent of slightly burned popcorn. It was probably the defining odor of my college years, though sometimes the wind changed and we smelled the turkey farm or the sewage treatment plant instead, which wasn't nearly as pleasant.) The really dangerous furnace-related gases are natural gas (and I know the smell of a gas leak -- this isn't it) and CO, which is odorless (and we have a detector). So it's probably not related, but who knows. Given this week so far, I figure I should consider all possibilities.
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Date: 2005-11-30 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-11-30 05:11 pm (UTC)burning smell & furnace
Date: 2005-11-30 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-30 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 05:20 am (UTC)