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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 10:45 am
When our heating system turned on for the first time last night, it seemed to work fine... until Kim heard a dripping sound start near the furnace a couple of hours later. Turns out that the expansion tank attached to the radiator system had sprung a pinhole leak, which was gleefully spraying warm water across the furnace room. Our attempts to patch over it with tape were ineffective (too much pressure, I guess), but they did replace the wild spray with a steady trickle. So we put a bucket underneath, turned off a valve that we hoped would do some good (the trickle did slow, but only slightly), and waited for morning.

Well, we sort of waited. The leak was producing about two gallons of water per hour, and our largest bucket holds about five gallons. So I got up every two hours or so to pop down and empty it out. When morning finally rolled around, I called the plumbers whom the previous owners had told us "know the house inside and out". They had a guy who was able to come to the house right between my two morning classes, and it was a pretty quick fix. I even learned what a few of the valves do!

All in all, not a pleasant night, but for our first potential major home crisis I think it went remarkably well.
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Sunday, August 16th, 2009 04:58 am
Kim just woke up to the disturbing feeling of a bat (herein labeled Bat #2) brushing past her arm as it circled the room. We turned on a light, but by the time we'd formulated a plan it had disappeared. Had it decided to roost somewhere because of the light? Had it squeezed out of the room the same way it got in? We're still not sure: we were complete cowards when it was actively swooping past us around the room so we didn't watch everywhere it went (especially when it was swooping low to the ground) and a fairly thorough search of likely roosting places turned up nothing.

Once we started searching the rest of the house, Kim spotted a swooping bat by the side door. (I'd already turned on lights throughout the main floor, but it was still dark there.) I managed to thwack it with a tennis racket, leaving it dead or very stunned, and we stuck it in a covered trash can. Occam's razor suggested that we'd found Bat #2, so we started to relax.

But then, Kim happened to see two more bats roosting behind the blinds in our breakfast nook. I've now grabbed those (using the earlier "towel and gloves" procedure) and stuck them in a cooler. (They don't sound happy.) But having found those, we now have no idea whether Bat #2 is still in our bedroom somewhere, waiting for the lights to go out.

Sweet dreams.