Bad, bad, bad

          I’m not exactly sure what I last wrote about the saga of my non-operational heating system, and I’m a little …. cautious…. about reading up on it because I don’t need reminding about exactly how painful its all been. So let me summarize: I discovered that the Divicon circulation pump hadn’t been working since the beginning, and the glycol had just been sitting in the solar panels, festering – or as they say in solar-panel-world; stagnating, rather than circulating into the 80 gallon hot water tank like it was supposed to do to heat my floor and also to pre-heat the domestic hot water tank.  Got it? The panels were making plenty of heat, but it wasn’t getting circulated into the system which means that not only didn’t they add to the heating of my home, but he panels were getting corroded. One of the panels subsequently started to leak.

over whose head?

          In every culture I’ve ever encountered, gloating is, all in all, frowned upon. And it should be, because there is an element of malice in it. Lots of cultures tolerate boasting and even encourage it in the form of machismo, but boasting is to gloating what irony is to lying. It’s the element of ill will which turns our stomachs. None of us think we harbor a lot of ill will, which is silly, since only one of us was Mother Theresa. I think it was Gehlek Rimpoche who said that we all say we don’t have much anger, that we don’t think we have a problem with people, but just wait until someone accuses us of something we didn’t do; all that anger and ego will pop up, larger than life and scarier than Pee Wee Herman in a darkened movie theater. Well, I’m just going to admit that I do feel so beleaguered and harried by all the

back to a wood stove

          I figured that I may as well admit defeat, so I went ahead and installed a wood stove in my house. First Gertie gave me a tiny, cute, cute little home-made looking jobbie, which took major surgery to get the door open because of the massive build up of rust inside it. Before attempting the install Bob and I set it outside with a stick of stove pipe jammed in the top and built a fire to burn out all that rust. It burned all right, but not great. Home made. When we (once again that would the Royal We, since Bob did all the tool-wielding. I just tried to be helpful.) tried to hook it up we

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Water well: check.

Here’s a post from may 07 which I never posted! Oops. Well drillers are an unusual species. They’re one part geologist, one part machinist, one part businessman, one part dirty day laborer and the rest is really just a mish-mash. I know this because I’ve spoken with so many in the past few weeks. In this neck of the woods there is plenty of ground water, so wells tend to be shallow, and shallow wells don’t make money for well-drillers, so I’ve spoken with quite a few. The ones nearby don’t want the job because they know that along with having a lot of ground water, we also have a lot of rocks. Big rocks. Enormous, actually. And they charge by the

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So sue me.

          We live in litigious times, don’t we? For those of you without a dictionary, that means we sue each other over anything and nothing. Its hard to say who’s the biggest hypocrite: Elliot Spitzer or Larry Craig, but I wouldn’t sue either one of them.  I’ll go on the record saying that I really, really, really don’t care what they do in bed. Really, I don’t. They could do it with radishes or thigh-high pleather boots and a whip, and it still wouldn’t perk up an urge to investigate further. Unless, of course, they hurt or abuse someone, which neither of them seems to have done, except in the course of normal life in which we all get a bit hurt and

The blame game

          As usual, I spoke to soon in my last post. Sure, the readout says “heat” , but the circulation pump was not sending that heat to the storage tank. The circulation pump is not doing anything. And the pressure in the system just keeps leaking back to zero. Bruce (he’s been demoted from Captain status due to a profound failure to give a damn ((yuk))) was lured out here one more time to fiddle with stuff because we were operating under the assumption that the circulation pump had failed and had to be replaced, and he recharged the

hotsy totsy

          Some weeks ago I went for a hike with Allie and Chance on a cold, sunny Sunday, and coming home, I was cheered by seeing the relief valve on top of my solar panels emitting steam. When I got home I went immediately into the control room to see what sort of temperatures were out and about it the system. I was thrilled that the panels had reached 104 degrees Celsius, showing that even though it was cold out, the sunniness was producing some admirable heat. I felt like calling Dick Cheney up in person, and telling him a thing or two about how to stop invading dusty countries.

Shocking, just shocking!

          My friend Margie was kind enough to supply me with a super-sized box of bath goodies, knowing as she does that I’m a thorough hot-waterist if ever there was one. I now have, in addition to my tubby, bath salts, pillows, pumice (owie! Don’t use that on your tuckus, even if you suspect unsightly blemishes which you can’t see because they’re behind you. Just don’t.), loofahs, unguents, salves, balms and a brushed nickel caddy on which to hold not only all this but a book, a candle and a glass of wine. I’m set. The box arrived on a Saturday, so I called my friend and told her “its