Another summer gone

[crfriend]

And so it came to pass that yours truly headed down into the depths of the basement today to begin the process of waking up the furnace and boiler for the upcoming Winter. This is a yearly event where the boiler gets drained, rinsed out as best as I can, refilled, the gas turned on, the thermostat turned up, and the safety switch turned on releasing 100,000 BTU/hr into the burners that heat the water that will turn to steam and keep us warm when things get nasty.

There is something very comforting about steam heat; the smell of it and the gentle warmth it provides cannot be beaten. However, boilers can be a pain, and one needs to make sure that the low-water-cutoff is in good working order. I've exercised that a few times and it's working well, so I'm happy about that. The house is warming up nicely, and once that's done I'll give the old thing a proper blow-down and reset the thermostat to something reasonable for the Winter.

Then will come the task of removing the air-conditioners and dealing with all the storm-windows in preparation for the deep-freeze and dark days ahead. On that note, it's time for a beer.

[straightfairy]

You guys had a summer?
I can't say I noticed much in the way of summer temperatures over here this year..

[couyalair]

Here in southern Spain summer continued until two days ago -- little clothing for everyone, lightweight sarongs for the emancipated few! Then the blue skies turned grey, and the Atlantic storms set in, sending us incredible quantities of rain, flooding, broken bridges, fallen trees, cars floating down disappearing roads, and even several deaths. No heating here to turn on; it's just a matter of remembering where one stored the winter clothes, thick pullovers and woolen kilts. In Grenoble, it has been cold for some time already, but there too, no heating to turn on in the flat; we just have to wait for the collective heating system to kick in, which rarely happens before mi-october.

The sudden 10°c drop in temperature has not been pleasant!

Martin

[Kirbstone]

Agreed. In another thread I mentioned 20 deg. Celsius as the temperature below which I find myself reaching for warm tights to go under a skirt. It is easy to count the days this past season when our ambient temp. exceeded this figure for any significant duration. Our perennial grey gloom & rain ensured that our values remained in the teens for much of the year.

For early dark season we burn renewable fuels in open fires, but we do have oil and electricity to heat the water and back-up the fires if we are entertaining, for instance. If we get another corker of a Winter like two just recently we'll be burning a lot of expensive oil. We're too deep in the country to have mains gas. Part of our oil-fired AGA in the kitchen has a gas oven, which we supply with propane cylinders.

T.

[crfriend]

In another thread I mentioned 20 deg. Celsius as the temperature below which I find myself reaching for warm tights to go under a skirt.

Other than for dress reasons, the first time since spring that I've resorted to anything beyond knee-highs for legwear was yesterday, and that was because it was a bit of a crap-shoot as to whether we were going sailing (in ~10 C weather) or going to hang out at one of our old haunts in Boston for a few cold ones. Generally speaking, it needs to be well down into the single-digits before I'll grab "the long stuff" from the top drawer; however, our climate here gets really nasty during the Dark Days where it may not climb above 0 for weeks at a time (and sometimes 0 F for several days) so we have fairly thick blood. So much for being at the latitude of Rome (Italy)!

Last Winter was, fortunately, a very mild one, although that had "interesting" consequences like a bloom in the number of mosquitos that carry such wonderful maladies like West Nile Virus and EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis), both of which can be fatal if acquired by being bitten. The Gas Company is betting on another warm winter and has set the price of gas to be the lowest it's been in positively decades.

[Sarongman]

Summer is a comin in
Loudly sing cuckoo.
Late mediaeval English song---The bird in question, in this case is the Channel Billed Cuckoo (totally unknown to the writer of the song), which migrates south from Indonesia each summer. I'm back to short skirts again and not looking forward to hot nights to come.

[Kirbstone]

My heart bleeds for you Sarongman. I wouldn't mind imitating that cuckoo. We never get hot nights here and hundreds of thousands of pallid Irish citizens queue up annually to be abused by Ryanair in order to experience a few and get their knees brown.

Yes, Summer is icumen in, but only on an airline ticket.

T.

[crfriend]

I'm back to short skirts again and not looking forward to hot nights to come.

The gross unfairness in this, of course, is that given the orbital ellipticity of the Earth the Southern Hemisphere is closer to the sun during its Winter than the Northern one. I'm good, make no bones about that, but I'm not good enough to right that wrong.

Of course, being in the Northern Hemisphere means I'm not hanging upside-down from the planet.

[couyalair]

... thousands of pallid Irish citizens ... in order to get their knees brown.

From what I've seen here, very few succeed.
Pink, yes, and frequently bright red, but they seem to have lost the protective genes for melanine.

Martin

[couyalair]

... being in the Northern Hemisphere means I'm not hanging upside-down from the planet.

I wonder if you'd be wearing a skirt in the southern half. The mind boggles!

Martin

[Sarongman]

crfriend wrote:
... being in the Northern Hemisphere means I'm not hanging upside-down from the planet.

I wonder if you'd be wearing a skirt in the southern half. The mind boggles!

That's why we hang helium balloons from the hems of our skirts
Seriously though, how are you going with the floods over there? They are in our news as headline news, so must be quite serious, although 2 football code finals and the antics of pollies and shock jocks are also up there and aren't really what you'd call earth shattering. I wasn't "on line" during our floods nearly two years ago but the Toowoomba "inland tsunami" and the devastation of towns in the Gatton shre made the world headlines.

[skirtyscot]

given the orbital ellipticity of the Earth the Southern Hemisphere is closer to the sun during its Winter than the Northern one.

Yes, but that also means that their summer is shorter, because the Earth goes faster when it is nearer the Sun.

(Mind you, I would happily take shorter and hotter, over what we get!)

[Jack Williams]

...and another one coming up for us. Last one rather a damp disappointment, so got fingers crossed! 20c (68f) degrees right now in here.

[the_scott_meister]

Martin, my heart goes out to the victims of the floods. It's something that can be and usually is devastating.

We haven't quite broke the back of summer here yet. Just when we think we have it shoots back up to triple-digits again. It's supposed to be 102-105 F this week. Pretty warm for October, even in Phoenix, but not unheard of.