Another week has passed, and I’m tempted to start throwing out trite cliches. It’s not like the damn things aren’t everywhere already, after all. At least, that’s the impression I get from the tiny selection of news headlines that slip through my exceedingly determined hermiting.
I know that boycotting news because it’s all so much biased bullshit with an overlay of horrible isn’t necessarily a good thing. I also know that I don’t have enough stress tolerance to deal with an influx of biased bullshit with an overlay of horrible. Not when simple, thoughtless comments that show off a whole lot of bias without meaning to are making me grit my teeth.
Not to mention, the gas heater is utterly and conclusively crapped out. The dead thermocouple, we could have lived with. The dead burner with the hole large enough to put a finger through is a rather major inconvenience. The fact that the heater is a 15 year old model and the parts would need to be special-ordered because they’re obsolete means we’re looking at replacing the old beastie in the pious hope of getting something more than electric room heaters this winter.
Alas, it doesn’t look like we’re going to win that one. I’ve spent the last few weeks with two heaters on all day, plus anything up to all morning under an electric blanket with the heat all the way up. Her ladyship loves that one. She parks on my lap and thoroughly enjoys her warm until I have to move to start work.
In the meantime, one or both the boys have worked out how to open the desk drawers. This makes hiding the mice in the drawer somewhat challenging. It also means the ribbons I’ve got in there (don’t ask. Things tend to migrate to the most convenient location available) keep getting hauled out, untied from their neat bundles, and played with.
Which is not nearly as challenging as trying to find trackball balls or batteries that the darlings have played with. Both of the boys like things that roll and make noises. Westley prefers the noisemakers, where Midnight will happily bat anything that rolls all around the floor until he can’t make it roll any more. It doesn’t matter to him how big it is, or how noisy. He’s just as enthusiastic with grapes that fall on the floor as he is with the kitty toys which inevitably migrate under the hutch where they’re out of reach of little fluffy paws.
Speaking of which, it’s time to drag a broomstick under there and haul out all the kitty rolling toys again. It might even delay the next assault on the mice a little.
The picture is Buttercup being “helpful”, from before I got the laptop stand. Lately she’s taken to moving before I can get a photo of her, so I’m picking up some of my older ones for the weekly cat picture.
Mad Genius Club 
I’ve had it worse – husband has been underfoot, watching game shows and Hallmark Channel nonstop, and making it impossible for me to get anything (writing, cleaning, OR organizing) done. I’m celebrating today, as he just accepted a 3 or more week job, starting Monday.
Congratulations! To him for the job, and to you for the time to get things done!
I did a quick skim of “not US” news this morning. Dang, there’s a lot going on around the world that doesn’t make it past the two topics currently on US news. Rare earth mining in Argentina, a British energy company claiming government assets in India, Russia being Russian {you’d think their leader had been KGB or something . . .}, a contested election in Myanmar/Burma, Australia vs. Alpha-oogle. And that’s just what’s not paywalled or requires digging.
Child safety locks for drawers will keep kitty paws out of drawers. We had them in every drawer in the house for toddler fingers but they also worked on cats.
They are annoying to use, which is why I removed them all when kids grew up and the crop of kitties didn’t bother with drawers.
That said, they work.
It may be worth the inconvenience since it’s less inconvenient than retrieving vanished items from under furniture.
One excellent thing about cats is that when your boiler ‘splodes, they do NOT take the opportunity to run out and piddle on the floodwaters.
Oh. Was that wrong?
????
Sorry, I was just making a not-particularly-clever joke.
No worries. My own sense of humor is deeply peculiar.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been having boiler problems for years – on my second new one in just 20 years. One would think that using gas to heat water would be a mature technology. One would be wrong.
There’s a case that it is a triumph of engineering just to get to the point where one would think it is a mature technology.
See, the Navier-Stokes equations are the, or part of the, best partial differential equation model for fluids. Navier-Stokes is a bit painful, mathematically. You can’t just tell the computer ‘Newtonian fluid, modeled as a continuum’, you have to have a shrewd idea what you are doing.
So, liquid fueled combustion for heating a liquid has a lot of things the designer can’t 100% predict. Getting the tech to the point where people really expect it to just work is kinda impressive.
I expect someone will point out ‘actually, solid combustion is also pretty horrible to design around. Have you even seriously looked at coal and wood?’
Anyway, any bets that the boilers in question were tested and built at your elevation and hence ambient pressure?
You totally should have built your house at the bottom of a half mile borehole, so that you could, in theory, get your boiler operating under design conditions.
🙂