!!!!!

This is what our front yard looks like right now. Sewer liner replacement with excavation. Paul Bunyan makes a specialty of installing sewer liners from inside the house without digging, but in our case they couldn't do it due to excesssive "bellying" in the clay pipe section of the main sewer line. 





They explained it all in advance and it seems to be going as planned, but it is still shocking to see your front walk disappear into a 9-foot deep chasm. I was not exactly surprised at the entrenching equipment tearing up the front lawn, but I was surprised how much hand-digging was required. Two sturdy young men spent about 4 hours yesterday and another hour or two today laboring at the bottom of those grave-digger sleeves just to uncover the pipe. 

And now the furnace has stopped working.

 Technically, it's a boiler. Same boiler that we had replaced in 2014 and massively overhauled 2 years ago to the tune of $3K, including a new circuit board. That circuit board is now flashing ERR 64 and the radiators are cold. It is 62 degrees inside. 

I called Midland Heating, the guys that fixed it in 2022. And to their credit, they did answer the phone right away and are sending someone over within the hour. 

Fortunately there is a box of small electric space heaters in the attic that I purchased the last time this happened.

ETA: Josh came out and got the heater going again pretty quickly, but I'm not convinced it is fixed. He thinks there might be a problem with the OTHER circuit board, the one that controls all the moving parts. But after he tightened up all the connections it started working fine, so he just charged us for the house call and called it a day, with instructions to call right away if it happens again. Uh, right. If that happens, he has all the info he needs to obtain the part that would probably need replacing, so I guess that's an improvement. Anyway, the boiler is working again and the house is heating up.