08:17 – Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday.
There was an article in the paper this morning about a rash of incidents of coyotes snatching small pets. Apparently, they’ll actually jump a fence, seize a cat or small dog, and jump the fence again holding the prey. Not that we have to worry about Colin. If there’s one thing a coyote is afraid of, it’s a wolf. Wolves kill coyotes for sport. And Colin is wolf-like enough to terrify any coyote. Not to mention that he outweighs a large male coyote by a factor of two.
Our natural gas logs won’t stay lit. We had them installed in 1996, immediately after an ice storm had left us without power for four days. Since then, they’d periodically refuse to stay lit. I’d always just used canned air to blow out the oxygen sensor and thermocouple area and everything would usually be fine. If not, I’d remove the concrete logs, vacuum out the thing, and then blow it with canned air.
This time, it didn’t work. We started having problems a week or so ago. I tried blowing them out, and it didn’t work. The pilot light would stay lit but when I turned on the gas the logs would burn for five or ten minutes and then shut off. So yesterday we did the vacuuming thing and re-lit the pilot light. The pilot light was still burning this morning, so I fired up the logs. They burned for five minutes and turned off.
Barbara dug out the manual and invoice. I called Piedmont Natural Gas this morning. It’s not an emergency, so they won’t be able to come out to look at them until tomorrow. I hope they can repair them easily. The company that made the logs went bankrupt in 2002, so we may be out of luck if a new part is needed. Worst case, we’ll replace them. We sure don’t want to be without them if we have another long-term power failure.