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I missed the Aurora Borealis last week because of overcast clouds that simply would not depart. This has made me bitter and mean so I am not posting until the New Year.

Actually, I’ve been doing more battle with the wood furnace. I found and fixed a clogged water refill line so that the low water light isn’t continually glowering at me like the Eye of Mordor from the side of the furnace. I also spent the better part of Saturday doing unspeakable things to a pile of oak logs with a chainsaw. Also, I mangled a brand new (and cheaply made) hand truck moving the cut logs over to the wood pile. Another lesson learned in the world of cheap tools. I should just order from the Snap-On truck and be done with it. Don’t look at the bill, for love’s sake, but it’d stop me from buying the absolute junk they sell at the big box retailers.

But I digress. It’s Christmas time here in Michigan and that means ….global warming. How else can I explain that its been over 50 degrees here and that the nearest snow is in the UP. The cows are happy, but I’m trying to play up the whole Norman Rockwell (not to be confused with notorius goldbug Lew Rockwell) angle for my collegiate daughter, who still thinks Cath and I are abso-freaking-lutely nuts for leaving the dubious charms of Chicago. Mmmmm…on a clear day you can smell the exhaust fumes. Also, Norman Rockwell never painted a drunken Cubs fan peeing in the alley behind your garage, but hey, what’s that compared to seeing some Chilully glass at the Institute for Highbrow Stuff?

I’m digressing again. Its the end of a very long year and I hope to put up a nice think piece about “Year 1″ sometime in the next couple of weeks. I will not discuss my recent trip to Toys R Us other than to note that it marginally prepared me for watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special on broadcast television, wherein Charlie Brown’s complaints about commercialism of Christmas are interuppted every 7 minutes by commercials for some new tawdry baubles. I ran home and ordered 3 Lee Marvin movies on Netflix just so I could watch *something* without commercials. After watching the first two movies I have to say that I think women are treated better in the Dirty Dozen than in Donovan’s Reef. Also, I think there was less drinking and smoking.

We put up our fake Christmas tree on Sunday. It seems even faker now that we live in the heart of Christmas tree growing country. Maybe I’ll hang a car air freshener in it to make it smell more real. On the other hand – what a great investment! Cath and I bought that thing in 1996 for $60. Assuming that Christmas trees are at least $40 I’ve saved $340 over 10 years. In 50 years, our kids will tell their grandkids that, “Back then, even our TREES were made out of plastic!”. The grandkids, of course, will roll their eyes and wonder for the umpteenth time if grandpa shouldn’t be set out to drift on an ice floe. I mean, no one would EVER do that with something as valuable as plastic!

Speaking of plastic, we got Christmas hams (or turkeys) today at work. Having a Christmas turkey running around my backyard as we speak (and probably pooping on the porch again), I chose the ham. This means the turkey gets a temporary stay of execution until Martin Luther King Day, which is kind of creepy. I don’t think most soccer moms want to start a tradition of killing the white turkey on MLK Day. Could get out of hand.

In the meantime, enjoy Christmas/Winter Solstice/Hannekah/Monster Truck Week on Discovery or whatever with your family. Its a time of year when all families should be together and thank god that their nutjob spouse/parent didn’t up and move them out to the rural hinterlands of America. And eat a ham.

I’m late posting again. Don’t look shocked. One of my oldest, best friends in the whole world, comedian Costaki Economopoulos was in town and I caught his shows in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. Only the KZoo show involved heavy drinking. I blame Costaki for the first week I didn’t post. This last weekend I had to fly down to Miami for an aunt’s funeral. That was week two. In between, I’ve been fighting more truck repairs (idler arm), suit shennanigans (recut for new svelt butt), and political finances (guess which party). Let’s put all that in the past and get on with Furnace Fun!

In late July I agreed to have a subcontractor come in to put in baseboard radiator heat on my second floor. A wood furnace AND a propane forced air furnace came with the house, but there has never been heat on the second floor. No vents. Nothing. It got pretty nippy up there. In July, this guy tells me he’s pretty busy, but should be able to get it before Labor Day. I actually didn’t get to use the furnace until Thanksgiving – when I found out that they’d ruptured a water pipe running the new line for the upstairs heat. Nothing like a foot deep puddle of 160 degree water around your wood furnace to let you know that you’re not saving energy anymore.

After they fixed that, I told them to wire the thermostat correctly so that the wood furnace would come on when it was supposed to and that I was tired of manually hotwiring it. The furnace was on when they left, so I was happy. 24 hours of non-stop heat later, I was less happy. Sweating and swearing in 80 degrees I stomped downstairs after researching my forced air furnace and my ARM-3P heating controller board online. I rewired the 3 thermostats (upstairs wood, downstairs propane, downstairs wood) into the ARM-3P correctly, fixing the moronic hack job the contractor did. There was still a problem with the relay that controlled the water pump on the wood furnace, but a quick wiring change made the pump run all the time.

A few days later, I replaced the relay on the wood furnace only to find the problem was elsewhere and I was using a lot of wood with the pump runnin g 24/7. The contractor’s next visit netted me the advice that I needed a transformer on the furnace and such. I won’t go into the details here other than to say I did not need a tranformer. I needed an 8 inch piece of wire from one part of the ARM-3P to another. I diagnosed and performed this task myself since moron HVAC guy didn’t get it. This fixed the relay problem and my wood consumption has dropped by half.

Moral of the story? There are several. One, do your own work when you can. Sometimes, the other guy is an idiot. Two, if I hadn’t taken “Electricity I” my frosh year in high school, I never would have learned half of what I know about wiring. This despite several of the finest Radio Shack Electronics kits that money could buy. Electronics can get complicated, but wiring a house rarely does. After 23 years, I still remembered enough to wire circles around a professional heating/AC guy. I think I got a ‘B’ at the time. Three, I was lucky. What if I’d started studying electricity the night it happened? I’d still be puzzling out the problem. There is no substitute for advance planning – even if I didn’t mean to at the time. I think I signed up for the class by mistake.