Well, last week was fun. A nice relaxing cruise around the Caribbean is a great way to break up what is feeling like a long winter.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Isn’t it nice to feel loved?
Is it Spring yet?
I keep waiting for things to warm up. It’s even cold (relatively) in North Carolina; when I went out to get some late dinner last night, I had to break the windshield wipers on the rental car loose. There was actual ice on the windshield; it was 30 or 31 degrees outside.
I’m more than ready to melt off the ice & snow, clean up the yard again, roll out the bike, tune up the air rifle for rabbit season and welcome the warmer weather. I believe our back yard may have become an actual glacier, so that may take a while to slide off into the fjord.
Consistency is the key.
I travel to Charlotte, NC fairly regularly. One thing that has been pretty consistent is the fact that it seems to rain almost every time I go there. This has not gone unnoticed; there was talk of bringing me back on consecutive weeks last summer when there was a drought killing off lawns down here.
Yesterday morning I was on a conference call and mentioned that I was leaving shortly to fly down to Charlotte. One of my teammates there said, “Good, we need the rain”. The weather was fine last night – but this morning, as I was walking from my car to the building… it started raining.
Consistency, that’s the key.
What I Learned About Strippers
I’m using my Remington 700 as kind of a test bed for a larger project, refinishing a desk my father built back in the 1960s. In the process of getting the rifle stock stripped of its old varnish, I tried two different products.
What a difference a day makes!
Wow. Yesterday it was 50 or above, snow melting, got the antenna feedpoint re-connected and actually grilled hamburgers on the gas grill outside! Pete took the dog out to the dog park, which was followed by a bath since he (Buddy, not Pete) came home looking like one giant mudball. What a nice day. Of course we had a small pond forming in the back yard, the joy of living at the bottom of a hill.
Now it’s 10 or below, the pond is now a glacier of solid ice, and it’s snowing. Wind is blowing like mad, it’s just cold as hell.
First day on the heat pump
The outside temp is finally over 20 degrees, so the heat pump has been running for the past couple of hours. Not bad… it’s a little odd to have what feels like barely-warm air coming out of the registers, but the noise level in the basement is a little lower (no gas burners or vent blower on), and the temperature is staying just as steady as with the furnace. We’ll see what the gas & electric bills look like.
Overall, the new system works much better than the old one. The temperature is staying much more constant, without the plus/minus couple of degrees we were seeing with the old furnace. I attribute that partly to the thermostat, and partly to the fact that the old furnace seemed to be just too big for the house. The air temp coming out of the old furnace was over 140 degrees F, so it would heat the house up in a BIG hurry. The downside was, it would also bump the thermal limit switch on a regular basis. During the old furnace’s last day or two of life it was cycling on and off every 5-10 minutes and still not keeping the house up to the set temperature.
Baby, it’s cold outside
Three degrees F this morning, in fact. That’s -16 to you Celsius speakers. Damn cold. Which is why it was especially bad when our furnace died last Friday. We now have a nice, shiny new furnace and heat pump, installed yesterday as a couple of electric space heaters struggled valiantly to keep the parts of the house we were in above 60 degrees. So far the new system seems to be working quite well. It’s not quite as quiet as I had hoped, but it’s not bad. Looks like the humidifier needs fixing as well, but it’s a minor thing.
All things considered, I’d much rather have the air conditioning conk out at 90 than the furnace die at 20.
Post-Christmas bloat
Some year I’d like to figure out how to convince myself I really do not need to eat enough for a small town during family get-togethers. I think I did better this year than last, but it’s still going to take some gym time to work this off. It may actually work out better for the dog. Now that I have a decent hat to keep my ears from freezing, I may start taking the poor little guy out for walks again. It’s easy to do when it’s warm, but at 20 degrees and windy it’s far too easy to just let him run in the yard and chase him around the house.
Well, back to the gym like the rest of the winter lemmings…
Is it just me…
or did the snow come about a week or two too early this year? I wasn’t quite done with things in the back yard when it started. I’m hoping we get a reprieve, maybe just a few days of decent temperatures with the snow melted off. I’ve got antenna work to finish!!