Moved

And we’re finally, mostly, moved in.

Rather than spending eight hours and risking permanent back injury, Laura and I hired movers. They got the job done in about two hours, and were well worth the expense.

The house is still filled with boxes and neither of us knows where things are, but I’m sure we’ll work that out soon.

This morning we woke up to 50F temperatures, colder inside the house than outside. After much obscenity, I realized that yes, I really was lighting the pilot light correctly, and no, the pilot light simply wasn’t going to stay lit. A call to a repairman confirmed that the ‘thermocoupler’ had failed. A few hours and $80 later, we had heat again.

The DSL has been spotty all week. The tech suggested I plug into the NID to eliminate a house wiring problem. Unfortunately, there was no NID. The telephone wires ran straight from the pole, down through a vent, into the basement. Daniel came over this afternoon, and we discovered that the Red Russian Army had secretly visited the US in 1944, just to install the telephone wiring in the crawlspace of my house. They used the finest technology Mother Russia could create in 1944.

In Soviet Russia, the telephones … nevermind.

Daniel and I ran a new segment of phone cable from the NIU [the fancy term for an ugly black hunk of Bakelite bolted onto the subfloor] to a new phone jack just for the DSL modem. I’ll check with Speakeasy tomorrow to see if this helped out any.

Next up, repairing [or hopefully, mercifully] replacing the Stove That Time And Degreaser Forgot. The people who owned this house before me seemed to be nice folks. It just seems they’ve never heard of cleaning under the cook surface. Yes, the orangey chunk is a bit of cheese left over from someone’s pizza, circa 1976.