Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

The temperatures have dropped low enough and stayed that way the the electric heater cannot stave off the cold any longer. Yesterday, I gave in and got the fireplace lit for the first time this season.

( Burn, baby, burn )

The living room is now warm enough that I can feel my fingers again.

While we had about a half-full wood box at the end of last season, Big R told me yesterday that they have only one pallet of the Pres-to-logs in stock and none on order, so at our first opportunity, Lisa and I plan to go over and buy that pallet. Running out of wood is a Bad Thing.

Yesterday it got sufficiently warm that I let the fire go out overnight, and this morning, I dug ashes and cleaned the glass. However, by this afternoon, it was cold enough that it was time to restart the fire.

( Coaxing the Stove Back to Life )

Of course, it will take hours before the stove gets back up to full heat.

Lisa and I went to Reno for grocery shopping last night shortly after midnight, as we do when we can manage it because it's less crowded. The temperature outside was around 4°C, and maybe colder, as Lisa found when she tried to clean the window of the Astro while I refueled. The liquid was freezing on the windshield. My hands got so cold that after finishing refueling, I pulled away from the pumps and went into the Pilot station to get a coffee, mostly to use as a hand warmer.

Both Lisa and I took most of today off, retreating to bed to stay warm and at least in my case to deal with the not completely recovered fatigue from the China trip.

Early this evening, with the temperature in the living room down to 15°C, it was time to take action. Lisa brought wood from the main box to the porch, and I set to building the first fire of the season.

( Light 'Er Up )

It will take a while to get things warmed up at it takes time to pump heat into the rocks, but once it's had a chance to absorb that heat, it should keep the living room much more comfortable.

Lisa made us some nice warm chicken soup for dinner. It helped warm us up from the inside as the fireplace tried to warm us from the outside.

We have several tasks here (some related to mounting the studio lights, some not) for which we needed small bits of hardware like nuts, bolts, a face plate for that outlet in the ceiling, and so forth. So it was off to Big R (which is a hardware store as well as a ranch and home supply store) to look through the bins of nuts and bolts. It's a good thing that Big R is not that far away, because it took three separate trips, the last of which was to exchange three fifty-cent nuts for three others that looked almost alike and turned out to have been stored in the wrong bin. In any event, we got what we needed, and several home projects have progressed another step.

Meanwhile, the temperature has dropped just enough to justify restarting the fireplace this afternoon. The morning, I cleaned the fireplace glass, shoveled ash, and vacuumed the area, just in time to spent time getting it restarted while Lisa worked on the small repairs. The current forecast suggests a chance of snow on Tuesday.

The fireplace in Fernley House includes a system that draws air through two ports on the sides of the rocks in which the fireplace insert sits. The air is drawn through the warm rocks around and behind the fireplace insert, and then through a vent that pushes the warm air back into the room. I noticed that there was a humming noise (not a fan-like hum) coming from the port on the right side of the fireplace and mentioned it to Lisa, who investigated.

( An Ex-Fan )

Lisa says she thinks it should be relatively easy to get a replacement fan motor. She used the Shop-Vac to vacuum the significant dust and cobwebs that had accumulated in the fan area. She also discovered that there was a hole in it that was letting cold air from under the house into the area, which wasn't helping. She's temporarily stopped it up and is working on a more permanent solution.

The other fan on the left side of the fireplace still works and there is still warm air coming out of the fireplace venting system. With today's low temperature -11°C, we need it. And I'm glad the dead fan didn't overheat so badly that it started a fire in a part of the fireplace that is not supposed to burn.

We've put this season's Jack-O-Lantern to work with its post-Halloween job.

( Birdseed Brain )

The weather was clear and blustery today, and probably the best weather we've had all week. Steve-the-plumber came to clean our chimney. While he worked on that, Lisa and I took our yard tools out to the East Lot and cleared another 100 m² of field, including a long strip down the fence, which is of primary concern in case of fire. We feel a bit safer now.

I helped Steve pull our fireplace out of its insert space (it's designed to do so, but it's very heavy) and to push it back in after he'd cleaned from behind it. We're good to go for another year, which is good because there's a storm heading this way. We went to Gold Ranch again because the PowerBall is now up to nearly $2 billion. I'm still surprised how few people stick it out for what looks like hours in the main queue, even in the rain. I went to the self-service queue and only had to way for about twenty minutes, including the roughly one minute it took me to actually buy the quick-pick tickets from the self-service machine. With the jackpot this high, the idea of what we would do if we actually won gets mind boggling.

We got a small bit of rain today (and light snow in the higher mountains) as a weak cold system moved through, so I decided to go ahead and re-light the fire in the fireplace for a while. It's been several days since I let the fire die, so the coals were completely cold, and that meant I could go ahead and dig the ashes as well.

I'm glad we have all of these N95 masks around, because that meant that when I dug all of the ashes out of the fireplace, I could mask up and not inhale all of that fine ash, which was a hazard I hadn't considered in the pre-pandemic days.

I could have gone ahead and taken the bag of ashes out to the dumpster, but I waited until the garbage company came and dumped it. Putting the bag of ashes as the first thing in the dumpster generally means that the next load dumped doesn't have stuff get stuck, as the heaviest thing ends up being above everything else when they tip it, forcing everything out of the bin.

Thank you to everyone who left nice feedback about the new bedside lamp, all of which I have shared with Lisa. Lisa does point out that aside from the lampshade, whose provenance is unknown, all of the parts for that lamp appear to be US made, or at least not from China.

The last few days have been relatively warm, which allowed me to let the fire burn out and to dig ashes (and nails, lots of them, thanks to burning old pallets for the first week of "fire season"). This also allowed us to work on a test paint job, as we decided to try repainting the flashing of the fireplace insert (not the main body of the stove) and to change it from its original black to a copper color.

( Paint Test )

This painting test went pretty well. While there is a storm moving in and even a small chance of snow again (mostly in the mountains), the weather forecast for this week suggests that in a couple of days we can let the fire go out again. After that, Lisa will get in and scrub and clean the remaining flashing. Once she has prepared the area, she can then apply the copper paint over the rest of the flashing. Ideally we should apply multiple coats 48 hours apart and allow more time for the paint to dry before re-firing the stove.

I like the look of the copper paint, and I think it will improve the look of the fireplace.

Steve-the-Plumber, who also does chimney sweeping as a side job, called us this week to see if we wanted him to do our chimney again this year, which we did. As it happens, it was exactly one year ago today that he was last here.

( Sweeping Through )

After working on the chimney from above, he came inside and removed the sheets he had over the fireplace to prevent soot from shooting out into the living room. He then pulled the fireplace insert out of the chimney and vacuumed behind and inside it. I helped him shift the insert (which is very heavy) in and out as needed.

After getting everything set back in place and the tools put away, Steve cleaned up and then Lisa, Steve, and I chatted for a while. We haven't had any plumbing issues (aside from small things Lisa can handle) this year, so we haven't had to call on him for plumbing.

Steve is semi-retired now, but still does chimney sweeping in the autumn. We're happy that he keeps coming back and cleaning our chimney. It's very cheap insurance against a chimney fire, especially given how the wood fire is our primary source of heat in the house. For the moment, the small electric oil heater is enough to keep the living room comfortable, but it likely will only be a couple of weeks at most before we'll have to start burning wood.

I almost set the living room on fire yesterday.

( How's that for clickbait? )

I'm just glad that I wasn't out of the living room for long. A few more minutes and instead of a minor inconvenience there might have been a major conflagration.