Pin the Tail on This

Christopher had the two useless 275-gallon oil tanks in the back yard, and so he got out his torch and cut a nearly life sized donkey form out of one of them, so that we can play pin the tail on the donkey at Bell's Brewery during the book release party party, May 24. (Of course blindfolded people with stick pins was out of the question, so we will use tails connected to magnets.) Also, I just got this bright idea of taking the giant ball of string to the brewery, in order to give it away to someone as a prize. I'm going to call it "Kalamazoo's Biggest Ball of String," and see if anybody can prove me wrong. I love the giant ball of string, that my nice Kellee got from her friend Matt, and I love it when the cat sits on top of it, but Chris is tired of the hundred pound eyesore. Kellee thinks we should keep it. But she doesn't think I should keep the dried marshmallow that I have been saving. "You can't save everything," she said. But this marshmallow is special: when I visited the Geek Group Headquarters out on North Burdick Street, the leader, Chris "Duck" Boden put this marshmallow on top of the seven-foot-high Tesla coil and shot purple lightning through it. Then he stuck it to a pop can that he exploded with a giant pulse of electricity. It's a marshmallow with stories to tell. She confesses she once saved heart-shaped sugar-coated gum drops for a long time for sentimental reasons. She said she tried spraying some kind of clear coating on them, but it didn't work. I don't want to save everything, not really. I mean, I'm willing to give up my great great aunt Marie's silver coffee percolator set with tray, sugar bowl and creamer, so long as it went to someone with some sentimentality. But we're definitely keeping the porcelain rabbit head lamp with the glowing red eyes that Chris just made. We hung it up on the porch, and now when we're drinking out there, we can call our establishment "The White Rabbit." Cheers!

Furnace Adventures

A couple of years ago, our oil burner died. Most people, faced with this situation would have paid the gas company to lay another hundred twenty feet of gas line and switch to gas, but we decided to stick with fuel oil. Our furnace man convinced us to buy a Thermopride furnace (he said it was the only kind he would install), made right down in Indiana, life-time warranty on the fire box. All in all, we got us a solid piece of American machinery. And it even looks good, a porcelain enamel surface in a mauve color.

http://www.thermopride.com/

So when we saw an exact copy of our $2000 furnace at the Re-Store second hand building supply store for $100, we couldn't resist buying it, so Chris could heat his pole barn, to more comfortably work on my car. Some guys at the Re-Store helped us load it in the truck, but Chris unloaded it all by himself. Here is a picture of him doing it with the use of his Ford 8N.

Well, it turned out that was the easy part, getting the furnace. Now he needed an oil tank. His friend Jonas, who lives downtown, has been wanting to get an old 275-gallon tank out of his basement for years, and so Chris spent a good part of a day extracting this steel tank from Jonas's basement, again, by himself (though I helped load it on the truck.) He got this all the way home before realizing the bottom of the tank was covered with pinhole leaks.

So now my brother George gave Chris another 275-gallon tank, the better of the two he had lying in his side yard. We got it on the truck and home before Chris discovered pin hole leaks around the intake valve. Shoot. Does anybody have a mint condition oil tank (without leaks) to donate? I'll help put it on the truck.