Seven Years to Make a Piper

It's sort of a game with us, to see how long we can wait before turning on the furnace each fall. Sometimes we make it to the end of October. Some years we have to turn it on while it's still September.

I turned on the furnace today. Mostly upstairs you can survive with slippers and a sweater; a quilt if you are sitting still. But downstairs your feet start to complain about being out in the snow so long and could we please go inside. My feet have loud voices--well, they are big feet--so I had to listen to them and turned the thermostat up. Usually, with this furnace, the next step is to take the cover off the actual furnace, get down there with a lit candle and light the pilot light. Today, I could hear the gas hissing before I even got to the furnace itself. I was afraid it would just be gas, but a closer inspection showed the pilot light burning brightly, and the after-burners (or whatever they're called) already lit! Wah-hooooo! The blower kicked in about 3 minutes later. The house is all warmed up now, an hour after that. I hope this is a portent of behavior to come!

Last night at group lesson I was more conscious (no fog), but for some reason I could not get the fourth part of Brogues on the Cobbles. I played it fine last week. I played it fine 3 days ago! What gives? There was a lot of laughter at the beginning of the lesson, but I can't remember what it was all about. Mostly it was teasing Lee about his new drone reeds (not the popsicle stick ones, but carbon fibre ones. Ooooooo!) and all his tinkering. He lends himself to teasing.