up furnace creek

We keep our thermostat turned pretty low, mostly to save money. I'm a warmblooded creature and don't much mind the cold, and B. keeps bundled up. Anyway, with her current overloaded work schedule, if she's not at work she's in bed asleep, under many layers of covers.

Consequently it was not until yesterday that we discovered that, sometime in the last several weeks since we last turned it up for visitors, our furnace has gone out. It's never done that before.

So, light it up again. This is, unfortunately, not that easy. I lit the furnace in our previous home every year - we turned that one off for summer - but this one I've never touched for that, and it is not constructed like any furnace I understand. (It's a "Rheem Heating Center Gas Fired Forced Air Furnace" with "Robertshaw 24 volt (7000 BER) Gas Valves.")

There's a brass plate, not signed by Sir Francis Drake but with instructions for lighting the furnace, but even less than Drake's plate, I cannot make any sense out of it at all. Start with the first instruction, which says to be sure the "main gas valve" and "pilot cock" are off. That's a problem because I can only find one of these, and I'm not sure which one it is, and if the position I found it in is "on" (I presume: there's no obvious little arrow pointing to the valve), then it doesn't turn off, but only as far as "pilot." So I'm lost already.

Later on the instructions refer to the "gas cock dial." I don't know if that's the same as one of the previous two, and if so which one, or if it's a third control device that I also can't find.

Nor do I know where the actual pilot to light is. I told you, this is a very non-standard-looking furnace.

Naturally I tried googling, but with no result. I found the manufacturer website, but I can't phone them on a holiday weekend, and the only thing the website does is sell products. No web advice page I could find deals with this particular model; they just have general furnace-lighting instructions, and they say, for any help beyond that, don't risk blowing yourself up, get a repairman.

So I phoned a well-regarded local heating service, and they said, sure, they'd come out and do it, but they charge $170/hour. Now I'm trying to figure out who else would do it - I called a reliable handyman service, but they haven't called me back, maybe again because of the weekend.

incepted

I watched the film Inception. I liked it. I liked it because Christopher Nolan has remembered a basic principle of storytelling: complexity in some aspects should be balanced by simplicity in others. The extremely labyrinthine story was told with plain simplicity. Except for a certain fogginess at the beginning, none of which interfered with getting up to speed once the main plot started, there was no point in the story when I did not understand where they were, what was going on, what the characters were doing, and (almost always) why.

( semi-spoilers here )