Good? Bad? um, Ugly?

A good thing happened last week, yesterday to be exact. At least I think it's good. I got a call from my tech recruiter (called "body shop" in the trade) and they told me that my tech writing contract at Bank of America was extended a month. Looks like we get to pay the mortgage for another month. My last day was to be Wednesday the 4th of Feb; now it's March 4th, the three-year anniversary of when I left MBNA to take early retirement. I remember the date because it's a military command: March forth! They even hinted that work beyond that date might be possible. Why might this not be good? It moves my availability out a month should another, more secure (be there such) contract appear. I don't want to get complacent and assume BOA will continue to be able to afford me. After all, they're one of the banks getting a bailout.

A bad thing happened last week. At least I think it's bad. It has bad aspects to it anyway. A little background is in order: Our house is rather oversupplied with heating systems. First, we use an atomic fusion furnace, and that's been pretty dependable (been going since creation without a hiccup), though sometimes a cloudy day will reduce its effectiveness. Then there's the heat pump. Takes electricity, but it works, and we use it sometimes, mainly for air conditioning. Third, we use a wood stove. This is our main source of heat, particularly at night, and getting the wood is teaching Joshua Jr some responsibility. Finally, the floor sequesters tubing to carry hot water produced by the water heater/boiler. It warms the floor and the whole house very nicely, thank you, but we almost never use it—the other systems do the job just fine. The addition-to-be (and the upgraded garage) is on the north side of the house, and we don't think the wood stove will warm that area very well, so we designed the new areas to be heated by similar floor-concealed hot water produced by our seldom-used boiler. That seldom-used boiler died. Our plumber, after he hooked up all the new tubes, discovered that water was leaking into the combustion chamber. Cost to replace would be more than half the price of a new unit, and I'd still have the rest of the old unit to start to fail on us. (The storage tank, for example, is a popular replacement item.) So spent what I thought was my last paycheck (see previous paragraph) on a new unit. $2500 so far. (Note to brother Bob: It's a Crown Maui.) This story is not without its good side, however—far better for it to fail now than after we start to depend on it to keep the grandparents warm. The plumber is a neighbor, and he drove to Philly and picked one up and charged me his cost for it. Then he did yeoman's work to connect it, and last night we had hot water again. So now we have a new, smaller, hotter heating system that we won't have to worry about for a long time.The new boiler is wall mounted, and now the laundry room has almost twice the usable space. The house has five zones; the copper tubing looks like that screensaver with all the plumbing piling up. I'd recommend Jim Winther to anyone, by the way.

 

Toward the top right of the picture you can see the bottom of the new boiler. The two green things to the left are the circulator pumps for the two zones in the garage. the big thing on the left is the pressure tank I installed last November. The dark plywood in lower center holds the plumbing for the original zone in the "old" part of the house. In the lower right is an open area behind four pipes with bumps on them. That area will hold the circulators for the existing house and the two zones in the addition.

Ugly? The snow-ice-and-debris–covered bare concrete pad where the addition will someday go is ugly. It holds promise, though.