Carbon Monoxide: Apparently Bad
Sunday, February 27, 2005 at 4:54PM 1 Comment What we've been up to over the past week:
E-filed our federal tax return
...After a weekend spent on intimate terms with TaxCut. I can't complain about the refund, but I'd still rather see Bush out of office than have a nice refund. Each year, we get to wrestle with the whole "We live in SC but work in NC" issue with the state returns, and every year we seem to handle it a bit differently. This year, it's the one area of our taxes in which we feel we're getting screwed.
Smelled natural gas in our house
Called the gas company, who came over and told us that although our furnace was not about to explode, it was emitting near-toxic levels of CO. "Have you all been getting headaches or showing signs of death lately?" Nice. Twenty parts per million didn't sound like that much to me, but I'm no professional. We have had trouble determining definitively what the actual lethal level is, and whether it is better to hang a CO detector high or low to the ground. There are apparently a few opposing views on this issue ("Hang it high - CO is lighter than air so it rises" vs. "Put it at knee-level next to the vent").
After having a guy from HVAC company 2 come and inspect the work of HVAC company 1 who had replaced the ducts in our house's entire first level, HVAC 2 suggested that HVAC 1 had made a couple choice mistakes that may have caused the CO levels to be high. To HVAC company 1's credit, they came out the next day and implemented the suggestions. And we went straight to Target and bought a set of Nighthawk CO detectors with the digital readouts to replace the crappy one we had before.
So far, these schmancy detectors have been reading a goose-egg on the CO levels, so I guess I can sleep soundly at night. So soundly, I may never wake up.
Continued to get ready for the baby bomb
...That's dropping in eight weeks. We may not have a name picked out or bought a car seat yet, but we're good to go with They Might Be Giants' new kids' album, Here Come The ABC's. It's all about priorities.
Reader Comments (1)
Nicely summarized. I'm glad someone's keeping track of what we are doing, because I feel I can hardly remember what happened three hours ago. Does carbon monoxide affect memory?