Happy belated birthdays!

msbelle, I'm in awe of all of the work you're doing.

It's forced hot water, so we have radiators. The furnace is supposed to circulate hot water through the hot water heater in a separate pipe(s), so that the non-potable radiator water doesn't end up in the good hot water. But the diagnosis is that there's a break somewhere in the pipe(s) and the pressure from the city main is actually driving the pressure (and excess water) back into the furnace, so thence the pressure valve is leaking mightily.

That's probably more than you want to know.

No, that's about what I wanted to know. We had forced hot water at our old house and have steam at this house. Boiler systems are more expensive, generally, to fix than furnaces. We had to replace the whole thing here some years back. Our hot water here is tankless (there's a little tank-looking object by the boiler, but that's a mumblemumble), so for us getting a water heater isn't even an option.

I was going to give you the name and number of our guy, but have been informed that he retired.

Late happy birthdays to yesterday's celebrants!

Today is my grand niece's first birthday. She's having a party here, at my sister's place. Tomorrow she'll have a birthday party at her other grandparents'. Then another at home with local family friends. My niece has said that a) she knows her daughter won't remember a bit of it and b) we've all kept the grand niece and her parents going for a whole year, so we all deserve parties. I like her perspective.

whyyyyyy does my mother have MSNBC on can we not hear about the orange idiot on this lovely morning

ugh Dana I'm so sorry

Dana I hear you—my sister and BIL leave msnbc on all day long in the background. I can't stand it, even if it's better than having Fox News on, it's still awful.

Yeah, better than Fox, so there's that.

I miss the days when my Mom kept on the Weather Channel all the time. She said she liked the background music.

One the things I hate about being at my parent's house is that they still watch tv news, but at least they do not watch the 24 hour news channels when I am there.

lazy morning. I think my body is caught up on sleep, I'm waking up on my own after about 8 hours now.

Today I am packing the sewing closet and non-liquid, non-essentials from the bathroom. Possibly doing so while watching documentaries.

The 24 hour news stations are absurd with the repetitiveness, but still better anytime than local news. Local news is all if it bleeds it leads awfulness. Hard to say whether local is better or worse than Fox.

My husband's aunt and uncle have a big Xmas Eve get together and she had MSNBC on in the kitchen the whole time just to fuck with the Trumpies in the family (of which there aren't many). I'm usually against TVs being on unless you are specifically watching a show but it was pretty glorious.

Trip home yesterday was pretty easy. Our flight was overbooked and they ended up offering a $600 voucher to switch to a slightly later flight so I took it and ended up getting a fair amount of work done while I waited. A Christmas travel miracle!