What a fun week

This week has been a non-stop thrill in household catastrophes. So many opportunities to learn valuable Life Lessons.

First, we ran out of heating oil. Apparently our heating company didn't realize that the first and second floor apartments have their own fuel tanks, and they've only been filling the second floor. With the weather as warm as it's been, and since last year we only had two or three fill-ups all season, I hadn't worried about it -- especially since when I checked the fuel tank late last week, the gauge said we had about an eighth of a tank left.

Life Lesson #1: Fuel gauges hate you.

In theory, an eighth of a fuel tank means about 30 gallons of heating oil, or maybe ten more days worth in this weather. In reality, this weekend it meant 0 gallons of oil, or maybe no more days worth in any weather. So I woke up the other day to a 40-degree apartment. The heating company came, filled us up, and yay, heat again. And perhaps now they know we are two individual tanks (though why they didn't know before I can't say, since they filled us up last year), so hopefully it won't happen again.

Today, the furnace was firing, things were warm, and I had moved on to other problems, like missing garbage cans. I had brought a garbage can and the recycling bin down to the curb Sunday evening. Monday afternoon, I brought the recycling bin back up, but the garbage can was gone. So I stepped outside this afternoon to see if I could find it -- maybe blown down the street someplace -- but I didn't even make it past the front hall.

Life Lesson #2: Fixing problems only leads to worse problems.

A radiator had frozen and cracked while the heat was off, and now that it was filled with liquid-hot aqua, was spraying water all over the front hall. I'm not sure why we even need to heat the front hall: it's basically open to the outside. The landlord said it keeps heat from being drawn out of the apartment, but it seems to me like weather-stripping the door would be a much more efficient way to do that.

Life Lesson #3: The landlord's plumber is on vacation.

This is a lesson we had learned last week, when the shower in the upstairs apartment sprung a leak and drained down into our bathroom, but some lessons are worth returning to.

Life Lesson #4: It is a good idea to be able to isolate and bypass potential points of failure in any system, especially one involving high-temperature pressurized water.

The only way to turn the water off to this radiator that is regularly exposed to sub-zero temperatures was to close the makeup valve that fills the heating system, and then draining the entire heating system to our apartment. I know basically nothing about home plumbing, so there may be a practical reason for this, but in the life-support plumbing systems I've worked on, nearly everything that's not a pipe had a bypass -- that means just before something that might need to go off the system, the supply branched off and looped around it. If you needed to disconnect it, you just open the valve leading to the bypass pipe, closed the valve leading to the thing you want to bypass, and boom, no need to shut down the whole system. Probably not a major thing, but it'd have been pretty convenient in this situation -- I could have shut the leak down as soon as I noticed it instead of waiting for the plumber to get here, and then he wouldn't have had to bleed the air from each radiator when he was done removing the cracked one.

So now I'm going to get some quick lunch, finish cleaning the water-damaged carpet matting from the front hall, and then maybe look for that garbage can....