Thursday, December 02, 2010

The Cold

Yesterday, our newish boiler gurgled a couple of times and emitted something half way between a roar and a groan. Its blue light flashed. 'I am close to death,' it said, 'forcing me to operate in these Siberian winds was frankly ridiculous.' Then it expired. I tried to resuscitate but its spark had gone. I phoned our heating engineer and left a message, and today left another one. I expect he's busy, and I'm wondering if other people's boilers have suddenly given up the ghost too.

So today I curl up by the fire and catch up with my reading (Modern Korean Fiction edited by Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon) because it is too cold to do anything else. I have cancelled everything. It was -2 last night, and -5 tonight - the coldest days of the year so far - the chill compensated a little by the clarity of the sky and a brightly lit day of long shadows.

5 Comments:

Blogger Anne S said...

Don't envy you the cold. Here in Melbourne we're having strangely tropical weather - humid and hot. Melbourne has a reputation for being beautiful one minute, awful the next with several different seasons occuring over the course of a day.

Keep warm and I hope your boiler is fixed soon

Fri Dec 03, 12:05:00 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My goodness, Clare! With temps of -2 and -5, it sounds like you're in Minnesota. I suspect, however, that you measure your temps in Celsius, so for us those temps would be 28.4 Fahrenheit and 23 F. We've had 8 degrees F (13.33 C) and 17 degrees F (8.33 C) lately, so your temps would feel balmy to us. We'd still need the furnace, though, so I hope yours gets fixed right quickly.

Fri Dec 03, 03:10:00 am  
Blogger Clare Dudman said...

Thanks Anne. At the moment I just can't imagine 'humid and hot'! And yet your winter was pretty bad too, if I remember correctly. And in Greenland it is +2 at the moment! Weird stuff.

Wow Mary, yes ours does seem balmy in comparison! It is quite interesting looking at the satellite pictures - the western edges of the country still green while the rest is white. The gulf stream is an impressive phenomenon.

Fri Dec 03, 08:55:00 am  
Blogger aliholli said...

Well we could all see our own breath in the spinning studio this week, then last night one of the lads brought HIS OWN HEATER to class to plug in....yes, its cold!!

Sat Dec 04, 08:14:00 pm  
Blogger Clare Dudman said...

Yes, Ali, I noticed even you had a long-sleeved shirt on last session! Seriously cold, I thought...:-)

Sun Dec 05, 09:49:00 am  

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