home

The furnace issue continues to plague us. As I said, I went online to try and find a solution, but that didn’t pan out. Saturday, I contacted a local HVAC service company and they didn’t return my call until today. Rather than schedule a visit, they instead gave me some more things to test and check out. Still we have flame, but no flame detection. This has gone beyond frustrating to just boringly annoying. I’m getting to where I firmly believe I cannot fix it in my house and that something is truly wrong, but I’d rather fix it if just to save money. I appreciate the people at Cogburn’s trying to help me out, I really do, but I’m just getting tired of it being cold in the house. Now, even when its 60°+ outside, it barely peaks at 59° in the house. Its gotten to where we would almost be warmer by just opening up all the windows.

On the positive side, I borrowed some wood from corwin75 on Saturday, and on the way home got an inspiration to check out one of the many locations I’ve been photographing for trees that have been cleared. I actually found a pretty good cache of wood to burn, unfortunately, the stuff that would actually fit in my Baja was a bit old and rotted. It still burns, but it burns up really fast. There were a couple tree-trunks there (about 2-3 feet in diameter and almost 25 feet long) of exceptional quality that would probably last us a year or more. Too bad I have no way to collect them.

Anyway, we went out and got the grill grate I’ve been wanting for a couple years now, specifically for Thanksgiving. Its got hinged sides so that after an hour or so of cooking, when you need to add more coals, you don’t have to try and juggle a 12 pound turkey resting on the cooking grate long enough to pour a new chimney starter worth of blazingly hot coals into the grill. You know, I’m just trying to make life easier. I do feel a little bad because we actually just bought a new grill grate about three months ago because the old one was beyond cleaning. So now we have two… Guess I’ll just use one for special occasions when I think I might need to dump in some extra coals. We also picked up a bag of Applewood chips to help smoke that bird. Its shaping up to be a really good turkey. I almost wish it was bigger. Those leftovers are hardly going to last. I need to remember to take a container for the leftover turkey as well. So on Turkey day I have to remember the following:

• Grill (duh)
• new Grill grate
• charcoal
• applewood chips
• drip pan (or two)
• container for leftovers
• welding gloves (just in case)
• chimney starter
• newspaper
• wand lighter
• meat thermometer
• and, of course, the Turkey

Also, I want to try to clean out the lid of the grill before then too, just to clear out some of the soot. I hope this turkey comes out even half as good as the first one. Mmmmmmm. Turkey.

Todd Rundgren – Hello It’s Me – The Virgin Suicides: Music From the Motion Picture [Emperor Norton]