A weekly note

A many shovel week! ☃️

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday… probably today, probably tomorrow.

And then… the cold hits. Single digits for a couple days next week. Exciting! 🥶

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The shoveling all deserves a mention because in 2020 our house went from not having a sidewalk to having a sidewalk.

It’s a sidewalk that meets the latest zoning standards, so it’s something like 6 feet wide. I’m too lazy to look up the length of our block—we shovel the neighbor’s section too, but I counted my steps the other day and I’m guessing about 180 feet.

So! 1000 square feet of sidewalk to clear any time it snows.

If it snows 2 inches, that’s more than 300,000 cubic inches of snow, which according to a site on the internet is maybe in the range of about a quarter ton.

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That’s why you need to stay on top of it!

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We have another space heater arriving today.

Radiant heat is generally great, especially when it’s normal cold out. But the thermostat for our radiant heat is on the other side of a kitchen wall and I’m pretty sure that any time we use the oven or sometimes the stove, the thermostat will pop up just a bit and the boiler will pause.

When the boiler pauses, the rate at which the insulation on the edges of the house allows heat to transfer its way to the frosty outdoors is noticeable. If you don’t catch it at the right time, the temperature in the outer rooms drops quickly—the colder it is, the more like a cliff.

All of this is to say—a space heater can come in pretty handy on the edges of the house, so a new one arrives today.

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What I would also like is a multi-thermostat setup that knows to keep the boiler on if the other rooms are below a certain threshold compared to the main room.

All of these things are fun to research, but we’re renters and the truly cold days are never more than a handful at a time, so the thoughts kind of disappear until the next year.

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This is a photo from this week 4 years ago, not this week this year. It starts to illustrate the effect of a cloudy, foggy, maybe snowy day on the rolling hills of the Palouse.

Yesterday I was driving back from Moscow and found myself yet again in awe of how the clouds and fog can almost make the horizon and the hills disappear. It was like being on a windy road driving straight into a square.

This photo isn’t that, but it gets close and I like it anyway.

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It’s an eve! Much to do, even though a pandemic keeps us in. 🤔

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Stay warm! 🥃