Sunday, January 18, 2015
I'm having a weird reaction to hands lately. Whenever I see hands in a photo, or even more recently in a video, my immediate thought is that there are too many fingers. Especially if the fingers are spread. I have to count them to be sure.
So far, in real life, hands remain "normal".
Something weird going on in my brain?
---------------------------------
I woke up this morning to a very cold house. I still had power. I still had gas - the stove worked. I checked the box and the circuit breakers were on. I checked the gas bill and I'm paid up. But BOTH thermostats were dark and unresponsive, and there was nothing coming from the heat vents.
I have two thermostats, one upstairs, one down. I have two furnaces in the attic, one for upstairs and one for down. It freaked me out that both were dead. Both, at once. Both?
It took me several calls to find someone who would come out and check, but I finally found someone willing to make an emergency call on a Sunday. A rainy Sunday.
The problem, it turned out, was in the thermostats. The batteries were dead in both. Yes, they do run on house current, and I had assumed the batteries were just for backlighting when you need to see the display in the dark, but apparently not. According to the service guy, the batteries do a lot more, and allowing them to die can burn out the thermostat. We put new batteries in, and now everything's working. (Yeah, I was aware the batteries needed replacing, but I couldn't figure out how to open the case.)
"But, both at once? Both during the night?"
He pointed out that if the upstairs one had gone out first, with the heat coming up the stairs from downstairs, I might not have noticed for a long time.
...Yeah, I did notice the last few baths and showers have been a bit of a shock when I got out. With the bathroom door closed (to keep a curious Jasper from falling in the tub; he likes to splash water) there was no heat in there.
Lesson - change the batteries in your thermostat occasionally.
.
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil, than to have good imposed upon him?
--A. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange--
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I'm having a weird reaction to hands lately. Whenever I see hands in a photo, or even more recently in a video, my immediate thought is that there are too many fingers. Especially if the fingers are spread. I have to count them to be sure.
So far, in real life, hands remain "normal".
Something weird going on in my brain?
---------------------------------
I woke up this morning to a very cold house. I still had power. I still had gas - the stove worked. I checked the box and the circuit breakers were on. I checked the gas bill and I'm paid up. But BOTH thermostats were dark and unresponsive, and there was nothing coming from the heat vents.
I have two thermostats, one upstairs, one down. I have two furnaces in the attic, one for upstairs and one for down. It freaked me out that both were dead. Both, at once. Both?
It took me several calls to find someone who would come out and check, but I finally found someone willing to make an emergency call on a Sunday. A rainy Sunday.
The problem, it turned out, was in the thermostats. The batteries were dead in both. Yes, they do run on house current, and I had assumed the batteries were just for backlighting when you need to see the display in the dark, but apparently not. According to the service guy, the batteries do a lot more, and allowing them to die can burn out the thermostat. We put new batteries in, and now everything's working. (Yeah, I was aware the batteries needed replacing, but I couldn't figure out how to open the case.)
"But, both at once? Both during the night?"
He pointed out that if the upstairs one had gone out first, with the heat coming up the stairs from downstairs, I might not have noticed for a long time.
...Yeah, I did notice the last few baths and showers have been a bit of a shock when I got out. With the bathroom door closed (to keep a curious Jasper from falling in the tub; he likes to splash water) there was no heat in there.
Lesson - change the batteries in your thermostat occasionally.
.
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