(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2018 08:04 pmThe weather was wretched this morning: ice storm, roads covered in glaze with just a little bit of snow on top. I delayed leaving until I was sure all the people who had to get to work on time were at work, and headed out.
About 8km from home my car started making a huge thumping sound, so I slowed down and pulled over on the edge of the multi-lane high-speed highway I was on, and found a finger-sized chunk of steel sticking out of my tire. It was curved kind of like a finger and both ends of the chunk were sticking into the tread. I figured the tire (less than a month old) was a loss, changed the tire in the snowstorm with semi trucks zooming past right behind me, and took the dead one to the tire shop.
Somehow, the big chunk of metal had a tiny wire-nail-sized curl coming off it, that was the only thing that had gone through the belt of the tire, so it took them only a few minutes to patch it.
Today I got home and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
threemeninaboat asked me to go outside and see if the hose was disconnected from the front spigot. It wasn't, and as a result the hose and the spigot were frozen solid. The spigot handle wouldn't turn. I grabbed a propane torch to try to melt the ice in the hopes it hadn't frozen back into the house (it's a freeze-resistant spigot but that only works if the water in the stem can drain out.) The propane torch was sitting in my unheated workshop. When I got it to light, the flame out of it was maybe the size of a grape. The fuel was too cold to vaporize. I brought it in and stuck it in hot water for a minute, and then, hey, nice big decent flame, melted the ice block out, and I could turn the spigot and, after a stressful few moments, water dribbled out, then shot out at full house pressure.
Disasters averted.
About 8km from home my car started making a huge thumping sound, so I slowed down and pulled over on the edge of the multi-lane high-speed highway I was on, and found a finger-sized chunk of steel sticking out of my tire. It was curved kind of like a finger and both ends of the chunk were sticking into the tread. I figured the tire (less than a month old) was a loss, changed the tire in the snowstorm with semi trucks zooming past right behind me, and took the dead one to the tire shop.
Somehow, the big chunk of metal had a tiny wire-nail-sized curl coming off it, that was the only thing that had gone through the belt of the tire, so it took them only a few minutes to patch it.
Today I got home and
threemeninaboat asked me to go outside and see if the hose was disconnected from the front spigot. It wasn't, and as a result the hose and the spigot were frozen solid. The spigot handle wouldn't turn. I grabbed a propane torch to try to melt the ice in the hopes it hadn't frozen back into the house (it's a freeze-resistant spigot but that only works if the water in the stem can drain out.) The propane torch was sitting in my unheated workshop. When I got it to light, the flame out of it was maybe the size of a grape. The fuel was too cold to vaporize. I brought it in and stuck it in hot water for a minute, and then, hey, nice big decent flame, melted the ice block out, and I could turn the spigot and, after a stressful few moments, water dribbled out, then shot out at full house pressure.Disasters averted.
