It's August 15, which (as I still have to remind myself every year) is the beginning of fall in Minnesota. And just like clockwork, here comes the ragweed pollen!

Just posted as a reminder to myself and a heads-up to others with hay fever.

In this case, the ever-enthusiastic silver maple. Which doesn't seem to be bothering my nose this year, but Holy Cow are my eyes itching! Nose is actually much better than 2 weeks ago (juniper/poplar presumably).

So we're in the middle of a major snow emergency and the Park Dept decides this is a good time to trim the trees in front of my house!!!





I was wrong. It wasn't the city. It was my neighbor across the street, who had scheduled some sort of tree work with a private company for the middle of winter. But they didn't park in front of her house, they parked in front of mine. And sure enough, the snowplow DID come down Pillsbury while they were parked there and went around them, leaving a huge snowbank right in front of my house. 

Neighbor called 311 and filed a ticket asking the city to come back and replow later, but I doubt that they will. If they were obstructed by another city service that would seem like a reasonable request, but when it's a private party? 

ETA. Amazingly enough, another plow came along after the tree trimmers left and cleaned up the street. The city is actually doing a pretty good job of plowing today. I wasn't out there until later, but I think Richard said that 3 different plows of different sizes and shapes came down the street in the space of an hour or so. Anyway, the street is plowed about as well as it can be with this much snow lying around. And I finally went out and did my part, which is Moving the Vehicles. That involves a fair amount of work, but I much prefer it to simple shoveling. It's a task with a simple, clear goal and one guaranteed moment of great excitement as the wheels spin and then grab, the car lurches forward, and suddenly you're free!  Whee!

In response to carbonel , who I guess was responding to other social media peer pressure example, I thought I'd start writing about my earliest memories of snow and see what popped out.

My first dim memories of snow are from North Carolina, where we lived high enough in the Smoky Mountains to get occasional dustings of snow. I don't remember much - just feeling the same joy and amazement that my grandchildren in Portland do when they get the rare and wondrous gift of snow. I also remember being disappointed that there wasn't enough to make a snowman, or even to completely cover the grass ("Is this all there is?"") We moved from there when I was 5, so memories are vague.

Then we lived in Connecticut for a couple of years, where it does snow regularly but apparently not enough to make an impression on me. In 2nd grade we moved to Maine, where I remember tons of snow. My best memory was that time the whole family worked together to make a giant snow horse as big as a real pony. It later developed a glaze of ice and lasted for what seemed like months. We talked about that magnificent snow horse for years afterwards and frequently talked about making another one, but somehow never did. We might have made a snow dragon or two - that's a lot easier. 

From 5th - 8th grade I lived in upstate New York near Rochester, where we probably had even more snow than we did in Maine. The elementary school was right next to our house, and they plowed all the snow from the school bus drive into the middle of the circle into a giant ice-covered mountain that must have been 30 feet high. The neighborhood kids climbed to the top and burrowed into it, turning it into a labyrinth of ice caves. It was magical. My memory is that this happened every year, but most likely I am remembering the peak snow year from that period. 

During high school we moved back to Connecticut again, which was more given to ice storms than heavy snows. Once I was old enough to drive, snow and ice became less enchanting and more of a nuisance, although I did kind of enjoy bombing down our quarter-mile dirt driveway, bouncing and skidding through the icy ruts to avoid getting stuck.

And now I live in Minneapolis. The climate was in a very cold phase when I moved here (1972), which was a bit of a shock. But from the beginning I have been perennially disappointed by the surprisingly puny amount of snow in the average winter for such a northern clime. There's nothing I hate more than a dark, snowless December. This year feels about right. Inconvenient, but like a real winter.

tldr; no heat. Again.

This is what happens when you replace an ancient boiler that had continued to function for 100 years with a nice, new state of the art boiler. Now 7 years old, the new one is having one midlife crisis after another. First the Gas Valve started faltering in early January (which you might recall was the middle of the coldest cold wave in the past decade, featuring multiple nights in the double digits below zero). After the gas valve was replaced, everything was hunky-dory until the next cold wave rolled in a couple of weeks later, at which point the Pilot Assembly started failing intermittently and was replaced Jan 21. February was uneventful and the weather even warmed up. At which point (yesterday, to be precise) the circuit board that coordinates the surprisingly elaborate restart sequence just crapped out, ending up with ERR 64 blinking on the front after each restart attempt.

So once again we have no heat. The part has to be ordered from the manufacturer and cannot be obtained sooner than Monday morning. Fortunately we are past the dead of winter and this house holds heat well. After 24 hours we are still above 60 degrees indoors. And Midland Heating is sending over 3 or 4 loaner space heaters to keep us alive until Monday. I do not blame Midland for their inability to fix the boiler so far. They have been extremely responsive, helpful and professional, and their techs have thoroughly explained everything they did. There really did seem to be a problem with the two components they replaced, and they made no attempt to upsell a new boiler. In retrospect that might have been cheaper in the long run, but that wasn't obvious from the beginning. And they didn't sell us this boiler, so if it's a lemon we can't blame them for that. This is getting tiresome, however. And chilly.

Josh showed up at 8:20am with the replacement gas valve, which is actually a little larger and more complicated than I realized, but still doesn't look like something that should cost over $1000.

tldr; boiler seems to be working great now. Crisis averted. Details below are mostly for me. If you happen to have hot water heat in your house it might be of interest to you. 


As before, Josh spent a long time adjusting and checking things after he installed the part. He verified that the gas pressure on the boiler side of the valve was now in the recommended range, then topped off the water in the system and bled the radiators. This was more complicated than it sounds. You add water by opening not one but TWO of the multiple valve handles on the maze of water pipes around the boiler, a little at a time, alternating with running up two flights of stairs to bleed the top radiator.

This gauge is on the left side of the boiler, low enough down to be hard to see. The bottom gauge measures water pressure, which was initially so low that it didn't even register on the gauge. After adjustments the water pressure is now where it should be (15-20). Water temperature (top gauge) is still registering low, but is clearly climbing now that the gas pressure is up. It should reach a max temp around 170F (80C), probably in a few hours. 

It's -18 degrees Fahrenheit and your furnace/boiler stops running. Yup, that happened on Thursday night. There was an error code (63) blinking on the front of the boiler and we didn't see a reset switch (because we're stupid. We were looking inside the front panel and failed to notice the prominent switch on the side of the boiler). So we just had sit and watch the temperature drop all day while frantically calling around to find a heating company that both services boilers and had somebody available for an emergency call. 

Fortunately, hot water heat takes a long time to cool down, so the radiators were still a little warm by the time Josh showed up at about 5pm. The outdoor temperature had come up slightly above zero and we remembered that we had a nice electric heater in the basement, so the temperature (at least at the dining room thermostat) was still in the mid-50's. Not great, but nowhere near pipe bursting level.  

The good news is that we found a well-recommended company that was able to get someone out to us within hours. Josh turned out to be just what you want in a home emergency: calm, friendly and competent. He also doesn't mind explaining everything he's doing, which is important to me. If you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for a home visit from an expert you might as well learn something.

The first thing we learned was where the reset switch was. The second thing was that there was a placard inside the furnace door listing all the error codes. 63 is "soft lockout," which is not exactly self-explanatory. It turns out to mean (at least in this case) that the gas pressure inside the furnace was borderline low, causing the furnace cycling to fail intermittently. Fortunately, that means that flipping the reset switch has a pretty good chance of restarting the furnace. Which is a good thing, since the small but jaw-droppingly expensive part that needs to be replaced is not available until Monday. Since the people who live in this house with me are troglodytes there is usually someone awake at all hours of the night to flip that switch as necessary. Richard and/or Thorin reset the switch 3 or 4 times last night. 

The cycling failure mostly happens when it's really cold out for some reason, so it's doing fine today and the house is back up to about 70. But the temperature is scheduled to plummet again after midnight, so wish us luck. 

Our service company is Midland Heating & Air Conditioning, btw. So far we've been extremely happy with their service. It's not their fault that the part that failed is insanely expensive or that the warehouse that they had arranged to get the part from this morning was inexplicably closed and not answering their phone. *sigh*  Apparently Josh drove over there this morning and sat in their parking lot for an hour trying to rouse someone on the phone before giving up and rescheduling us for Monday morning. 

There are tons of places to cross country ski in the metro area but most of them cost money (a ridiculous amount of money in the case of the Minneapolis Park System) or have no place to park or both. This one is beautiful, free, and has a gigantic parking lot. The downside (for me) is that it is kind of a long drive, but it's convenient for my current skiing buddy so if the weather holds we'll probably be back there again.


It's the Bunker Hills Golf Course. Not to be confused with the adjacent Bunker Hills Regional Park, which is both expensive and much too hilly for wimpy skiers like me. The day was spectacular - 20-something degrees, blue sky, barely breezy. Unfortunately, something about the combination of sun and temperature made the snow not nearly as good for skiing as it looks. For some reason, you just could not glide. It wasn't just us - almost all the other skiers we encountered were having the same problem, even the guy with waxed skis. But as everybody paraphrased, "Well, yeah, the snow IS awfully sticky. But it's so beautiful today!!" So we just tried to pretend that we were on very long snowshoes and enjoyed the opportunity to get out. 

This year the hurricane names got all the way to S, an increasingly less rare occurrence but still not the norm.  But once again I did not get a hurricane named for me. 

... was full of unexpected drama. First, a closeup view of the millefoil chomper hilariously trying to maneuver around the ducky float. Then it churned back and forth right in front of the shade pavilion while I ate my breakfast sandwich. Which might have been irritating if it was an ongoing phenomenon but as the closest view I have ever gotten of this amazingly steampunk looking machine was actually quite entertaining.

Then, BLAMMO!  Out of nowhere, a huge cloudburst! Suddenly I had lots of company under the canopy, definitely glad that I got there shortly after opening time to grab the best table. The storm blew away as quickly as it came, after maybe 20 minutes of torrential rain. Fortunately I had my new ultra-totable bike bag with me in the shelter, and I happened to have a handy all-purpose cotton scarf in there that could be used to mop off my bike seat before I rode away.