Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Still haven't managed to get the wall heater working. One problem is that I can't see the thermostat setting because the bookcase is in the way, but that only means there are two possible positions to check out: on and off. (The actual temperature slider is easy to deal with because you can feel it go "sprong" when it passes the set-point. But the on/off isn't intuitively obvious.) Combine this with the heater's past tendency to take half a day to get with the program when first turned on for the season and it can take a couple of days to confirm that it isn't responding properly. And then there's the matter that I really don't spend much time at home and awake during the work-week, and a lot of that is down in the living room with the woodstove. So it hasn't quite worked its way up to top priority yet. Now if only I can remember the trick of getting the stove fired up without spewing smoke all over first.

Big M News: My mortgage rep thinks we may be able to get the thing wrapped up by the end of the year. Well, actually, what she said was, "If you don't tell me you want it completed by the end of the year, it isn't going to happen. If you tell me you want that deadline, it may happen." Since it would be convenient (for tax purposes -- no split years with part on the partnership and part just me) but not absolutely necessary, I told her to work on the theory that we want it completed by then. My task of the day is to identify and contact a title company.