A good day

The cheese arrived today! It’s already been eaten. I remembered to take a picture of the second half of it. Let me tell you,

it was some good cheese! Wow! We all enjoyed it a lot. The children made sure they told me more than once that I should be sure to enter every cheese giveaway that mmpaints has. With cheese this good, they don’t have to tell me. I think we’re going to have to give cheese-making another go. We haven’t made any for a while, and it was never this good. Time to learn a bit more and develop a new skill.

Today’s weather was nice: in the lower 40s with sunshine. We’re under a winter storm warning beginning at 6:00 tomorrow morning and continuing until Saturday afternoon. The forecast says 5 to 9 inches of snow is expected here. We haven’t had that much at once in the whole time we’ve lived here. The children are looking forward to it.

Since the weather was nice, I worked on the water heater installation again. I took the heater out and redid the plumbing. My hunch appears to be correct: Teflon tape doesn’t work well on metal plumbing components. The threads cut the tape and push it mostly out of the way. I put some joint compound on the threads, and there were no more leaks. I cut the CPVC pipe and put in a new coupling. I let it sit for a few hours to make sure the glue was thoroughly dried before turning the water back on. No leaks there either.

So, I put the water heater back in the closet, hooked up the water lines, and routed the vent pipe through the wall. I’ll check it again tomorrow, but I think it will be fine now. This particular water heater connects to a 20 pound propane cylinder, the kind commonly used with LP grills. It can heat the water hot enough to scald you. I’ve got the adjustment for the flame turned down so that the heat in the shower is just about right. If it’s too hot, you just need to open the hot water side a little more. I think it will work out fine for us since our only hot water from it will be for taking showers.

While I was testing the water heater, our cat came home. Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but it was. He was missing for two full days. This is very unlike him; he likes to eat too well to miss a meal. We figured he either got himself stuck someplace (he somehow got under the floor in Dad’s barn earlier in the week) or something got him. We were quite concerned (I hadn’t realized how fond I am of that cat). Thankfully, this afternoon he came walking up the hill to the house. We don’t know where he’d been, but he was quite thirsty and hungry and glad to see us.

Later this afternoon it was too early to do chores and I didn’t want to waste the time and nice weather. So, I decided to install some more solar panels. I figured there was enough time to get two of them put on. Well, the installation went well enough that I was able to bolt four of them on. So, one frame is complete. Six more panels to go on the other frame. I’ll tackle that next week after the snow is melted.

My dad voiced a concern about the panels acting like sails and catching the wind up there. The roof on our mobile home is basically flat, and the pitch on the back porch roof is very shallow. So, the panels stick up in the air a ways. I do believe that if they blow off, they’re taking the porch roof with them. However, I think I’ll go ahead and put some guy wires on the top corners down to the other side of the house in order to provide a little extra insurance against strong winds.