Lucky

Well, it seems my hard times carried on after my last blog post. I started this week with a pretty serious streak of bad luck.

Sunday Afternoon: I arrived home, after spending the night at my second home, at roughly 5 p.m. As I pushed open the back gate and turned towards the door, I was perplexed to see that the back door was propped open with a shovel. In my confusion I made some sort of sarcastic exclamation, and then approached the door.

Then I realized that my renter, Mohammed, was standing in the door way and the house was full of smoke. He explained to me that there was something wrong with the pellet stove and it was filling the house with smoke. He said he had gone down and unplugged it and he had the door open to get the smoke out.

Right away I thought I knew what the problem was, so went down stairs to “take care of it.” Well, it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. From across the room I could see smoke pouring out from around the door to the pellet stove hopper. I thought, “well, that’s not right. That part shouldn’t be on fire,” and went over to take a closer look.

When I opened the lid the amount of smoke coming out must have tripled three or four times. I could see that the pellets in the hopper had been burning. For anyone not familiar with pellet stoves, that is super bad. So bad in fact that I am going to reemphasize it again, and say, that is super super bad.

Fortunately because Mohammed has unplugged the pellet stove, that was some really quick thinking on his part. With the stove unplugged, the fan that feeds air into the stove had turned off, so the fire was not longer getting the air it needed to burn freely, and had probably died down quite a bit.

At this point I realized that I couldn’t just leave the burning pellets in the hopper, or the smoke would never stop. So I went and got a metal bucket from the garage. Then I set out to find something I could use to scoop the pellets out of the hopper. I ended up only being able to find an old empty margarine container. I dumped the nails and drill bits out of it and set off to start digging out the pellets.

Then it hit me. There was a lot of smoke in the basement, and it was getting hard to breathe. So I went looking for a dust mask I had from when I used to work in a mill. That search was short lived though, and once I couldn’t find it I decided to just wet a rag and hold it over my face.
It took me a about four or five minutes to empty the pellets from the hopper. Most of them were charred black, and quite a few had turned into red embers. The entire time I was emptying it I was worried the fire would catch again, not that it was being reintroduced to air, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. I took the bucket outside and put it in the snow. It sat there all week and melted its way to the ground, and the pellets have now all burned away. Crazy huh? It just smoldered all week in like minus thirty weather.

Anyway, we ended up opening all the windows and doors and got some fans going to get the smoke out. It worked, but the house still smells like smoke. All my things still smell like smoke, and I still smell like smoke.

That’s the main part of that story, but my bad luck doesn’t end there.
Tuesday Afternoon: My brother comes over to take a look at the house and see if everything is okay, while I’m at school. He notices a red spot in the snow in the middle of the drive way, and calls to let me know my transmission is probably leaking tranny fluid.

At first I’m not so sure it’s my car. A contactor had visited the house Monday, and I say it would have been his truck that was leaking. After all, I replaced my transmission no more than five years ago; they have to last longer than that right? So I park in a different place and check the next morning. Sure enough my Transmission is leaking. Well, it a good thing I hadn’t got my student loans yet or I might be able to afford to get that fixed.

So when I finally get the chance, early Thursday morning I got the Great Canadian Oil Change. It turns out that my tranny is leaking in two different places. 1. The tranny filter. 2. The speed sensor. They guys working on my car couldn’t do anything about the sensor but they replaced the filter and that slowed the leak considerably. It should buy me sometime till I can get it looked at again.

They ended up doing some other work as well; I won’t bore you with the details. It ended up costing me $180.00 which I paid for with the help of my trusty over draft.
So there you have it, my unlucky streak.

But, I should be receiving my student loans Tuesday. It looks as if my luck is going to change.