On top of my usual 8 hour work day today, I had to figure out something for mothers day. I didn’t have it in me to wish my sister’s in law happy mothers days, but I got my mother and grandmother a card. I wanted to get my mother flowers, but all florists were closed for some insane reason on their second most lucrative day of the year (behind Valentines), so I clipped some fresh daffodils the previous owner had growing in this little concrete well pit in my back yard, added a couple small yellow flower branches from the bush next to the lilac that blooms yellow in the spring, put them in an orange vase I found in the back of the cupboard and dropped them off at her house.
Then went back to work. First cottage was cake. Zero problems. Sailed right through. Second one, I ended up hung up on the furnace and leaving before getting anywhere. It’s a crazy floor mounted furnace, underneath this gigantic grate that you have to lift off to light it. It’s neat in that it’s powered by gas and nothing else. Zero electrical wires run to it. The heat from the pilot is converted to enough electricity to power the gas valve, and it just radiates upwards and outwards and heats the small home pretty well without any kind of a blower. Lighting the pilot is an interesting process. From above, there is a four foot rod that extends deep into the unit, and is strapped to the top of an ordinary honeywell gas valve. You can rotate it from the off position, to the pilot position, and once the pilot is lit- to the on position, from above. You can also light it from above, even though the pilot is at the bottom of the unit four feet away, through a tiny porthole the size of a silver dollar. It comes with this long metal rod, almost like a straightened coat hanger, with a little bent loop at the end designed to hold a match stick nice and tight. After striking the match with the box, and using the light from the match to navigate deep into the unit, you insert the rod all the way to the bottom and- while depressing the rod in the pilot position- you ignite the pilot with the match before it burns out.
I tried this several times, and could not confirm that any gas was coming out of the gas valve to be lit with the match. Maybe I need to bleed more air out. Maybe I need to crawl back under the house, disconnect the pilot tube, and try blowing through it. Usually if you are trying to light it before it’s bled off all the air, you will see the flame being blown around like a candle in the wind when you put it near- but in this case there was no air moving around it.
And now that I think of it, I’m almost positive I left a hatch door open on the side of the house. I’ll have to drop in tomorrow and at least close it, even though I’ll be burning it all the way up to Cross Village to turn on the very cool somewhat famous Legs Inn restaurant, and associated worker living spaces. And several other cottages way up in that area. I might have to start doing dinner as a second lunch break, and then running another 4 hours afterwards for a 12 hour work day instead of 8. Too much to do still, the winter last year was too hard on these places- so many things to fix it seems in each one. And our only employee just announced his departure.
Someday, I dream of having my mind back to write about things that aren’t so lame and boring as work venting.
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