XKCD comes through again!

The weirdest “I Voted” sticker you have ever seen. It is also the winner in a contest to design those stickers.

Happily, no one in my family has asthma, but here is good news for anyone who does. More good news.

Elder Son and wife Amanda are on vacation.

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In other news, we are selling our house in Minneapolis. It has been a l-o-n-g process. I don’t think I ever posted the story of how the furnace failed during an extended and extreme cold snap back in 2019. The high-low thermometer in the living room said that the temperature in that room got down to 8˚ F. Every radiator in the house, all 11 of them, cracked and leaked. At the time Younger Son was living there; he had a business trip that week so he was not home to monitor the situation. He did, however, turn off the water at the meter before he left. Smokey told him to do that because he saw that the weather forecast was for extreme cold, and we always had trouble with the half-bath on the northwest corner of the house. YS did that – thank FSM! — so when the regular plumbing water pipes burst, they only leaked the water already in them instead of flooding the entire place.

Also, thank FSM for insurance! The cost approached $100,000* to replace all the radiators, patch the holes in the walls where workmen had accessed the burst water pipes, repaint entire walls, and put YS (and his dog) up in a hotel until it was warm enough for him to move back. All those repairs took exactly 365 days.

In retrospect the cause of the furnace failure was not the fault of the furnace. On the news we learned that it was so cold that the pipes supplying natural gas to large parts of Minneapolis and suburbs could not keep up with the demand. A more modern furnace — this was the original from 1937 — probably would have had some kind of automatic restart. We did replace that furnace with a high efficiency modern one during the extensive repairs.

(That one failed, too, at some point last winter. Don’t know why. The repairs that time were much less extensive.)

Once all the repairs had been done, we had to get the house ready to sell. New flooring in the kitchen and hallway to replace the kitchen and half-bath linoleum, new flooring in the four-season porch to replace the mangy carpeting, new flooring in the finished basement, ditto, refinishing the hardwood floors. Smokey had to finish the electrical upgrade that had gone unfinished since we remodeled the kitchen in 1987. Those were the big things; I do not remember all the smaller projects that had to be completed, but there were a lot.

All this meant that Smokey spent a day nearly every weekend since 2019 working on that house, and filling his car with stuff that we needed to deal with. A few weeks ago the house was sufficiently empty that it made sense to hire movers to deal with the rest.

…and then it was done. Everything is in the porch for now, and nothing got damaged, including Smokey’s and my backs; that would have been a certainty if we had attempted this move ourselves.

The Mpls house has been cleaned, and our realtor** is having it staged*** this week. She will have a realtor open house the following week, and we are all hoping it will sell soon after.

This has been such a long process, soon to be over. :: fingers crossed:: Our fantasy is that buyers will be so awestruck by the house that they start a bidding war. But as long as we get the asking price we will be happy. And then we can finish this house!

* Thank you, State Farm!

** Younger Son recommended our realtor; she is a friend of his. Lisa was formerly a social worker, but the pay was so abysmal that she changed professions. Her personality is definitely not one like the usual realtor; her main objective — after selling/buying — is to make everyone happy. We love her. If she weren’t already married we would be urging YS to date her.

*** Staging means our realtor hires a professional stager to put furniture in the house to make it look as though someone were living there. Apparently that improves the house’s saleability.