Random Thoughts for the 1st of November

I am back. I have had quite the weekend and some thoughts have occurred to me. Why is it that when the furnace decides (as if an inanimate object has free will and actually makes decisions) to breakdown only on weekends or holidays? It is similar to the question of why does my father in law take ill, and go to the hospital ER, only on weekends and holidays?

Yes, that is correct, we are in furnace hell. Actually, the opposite of hell, since we have not had heat since early Saturday morning. The brightside is that it has been rather mild, so the house is not too bad, unless of course you are actually in it. It scares me to say that I have to open the windows to let warm air in.

My wife wakes me at 4:30 on Saturday morning to say she smells something burning. Of course, she smells it but her only action is to wake me. I have to get up and look/smell for the source. It smells like burned plastic or rubber, but definetly something burning/burned. I make my way to the furnace and I can hear the fan going. I look inside and see that there is no flame. It could be that with the thermostat turned down, I do not like heat when I sleep, that the heat has kicked off and the fan is blowing the residual heated air. I turn up the thermostat, hear the click of the ventor motor and then smell gas.

That is a bad thing no matter how you slice it. I call the gas company and by five have a guy out to see if there is a gas leak. His reading are negative but in the mean time I shut off the furnace. My wife was wretching from the smell of the gas, I presume, or she was just wretching (which is always a pleasant sound). Gas guy comes, finds nothing in terms of a gas leak or carbon monoxide, but opens the furnace to find that the casing on wires on the ignitor have melted. That explains the smell but means trouble ahead. He shuts off the gas and crisis is averted except that I have to call my furnace guy later Saturday morning.

We go back to bed at 5:30 but I do not fall back asleep and start to doze when the lad comes in at seven to watch his cartoons. I call the dude at nine and leave a message. I finally speak to somebody near noon. He is up north for the weekend and will not be able to have a look until Monday morning. I figure we can wait since nobody else will come until Monday and it is a nice weekend weather wise. We will just have to bundle up while sleeping. Yes I have been wearing a hoodie, with hood on, to sleep the last few nights.

To make a long story short, I have a hole in my heat exchanger and that caused the flame to back up. Somehow the heat sensitive switch that is supposed to react to excess by shutting down the gas, did not work. That could have been a disaster and would have meant no more posts from me FOREVER. He figures, and rightly so, that given the time and cost of the parts, it is cheaper to replace the furnace instead of repairing it. It was sixteen years old, so the hole in the heat exchanger occurred a little too early for my liking. I was figuring we had another four years, I was wrong, but at least we now have a five year warranty with it. On the other hand, the ventor motor went on the old one in year seven, when my wife was eight months pregnant, in early December. That was a cold night and morning, I will tell you.

Of course the thing won't be fully installed and usable until Wednesday. He is putting the new one in place right now and must measure for the duct work. He will complete the installation tomorrow and we will be about $3000 lighter for the privilege. We do NEED heat, damn Canadian winters, falls and springs.

To top it all off, my father in law has had nose bleeds from hell. He is on a blood thinner, so that would explain the difficulty in stopping the bleeding. After three trips to the ER, where they could not find the source (probably a burst blood vessel given how loud he sneezes, or he was just picking his nose too much, let that be a lesson to all you kids out there about the dangers of picking your nose). He bled all over the beige carpeting so there will be a cleaning on Saturday. He is now on home rest until his doctor appointment on Thursday as he had to be removed from his blood thinning medication. He had his nose packed. Apparently it looks like he has tampons sticking out of each nostril all, tied together to his head. It must be lovely sight and I am sure he is making all the ladies "moist" when they see him like that.

At least he did not lock himself in the bathroom as well as having the profusely bleeding nose. That would have been a sight. A gruesome sight but given it was Halloween, it would have been appropriate. That is all for now, so I gues it was really but a random thought. Ciao!