Get thee behind me, Murphy

... because if I catch you in front of me, I'll kick you in the nuts.

Let's see.  The catalog of fun starts last night with the top two floors of the house being inexplicably cold, from where we segue to this morning when it's even colder.  After dropping Goose off for her school bus, I go down to the crawlspace to investigage.  There, I find out that one of the two furnaces — the newer of the two, oddly — has stopped igniting.

I proceed to begin some basic troubleshooting, though I can't spend too much time on it because I need to get Pirate and Wen to their school bus.  But that's OK, because I don't get to do very much.  Because at 0733, the power goes out, and doesn't come back.

I light the gas (win!) range with a butane grill lighter to make them oatmeal, then take them off to school (having missed their bus), remembering as a precaution to switch off the laser printers and most of the outlet strips, to avoid tripping the breaker should the power come on before I get back.

It does.  The applicable breaker trips anyway.  Upon resetting the breaker, I discover that I forgot to turn off the outlet strip under my desk.  All the machines in the rack are fine, but babylon5 won't boot.  The POST diagnostic screams about a CPU failure.

I oscillate back and forth for a while between troubleshooting babylon5 and troubleshooting the furnace.  I get as far with the furnace as I can before my knowledge of Lennox furnaces is exhausted, then pick up Wen from her school bus, call Eastern Propane, and get back to troubleshooting babylon5.

A temporary CPU swap with mabolgamp, which is also an AthlonXP box, reveals that the CPU is not at fault.  I've already eliminated the SCSI subsystem and memory as possible failures.  Acting on a sneaky suspicion, I search for — and find! — my spare power supply and jury-rig the connectors.  First success of the day!  babylon5 boots.  I power it down again, install the replacement power supply properly, and boot it again.  It comes up with disk errors.  As I'm about to start working on them, the Eastern Propane guy arrives.

Down the the crawl space we go.  I bring him to date on the symptoms, the diagnostics I've done, what I've checked so far.  Then I go back upstairs to work on babylon5, which in the meantime has cleaned up its disks, rebooted itself, and is now sitting there resyncing mirrors.  Slackware FTW.  Mysteriously, mysqld has not started.  I start it manually, then restart Bacula, which didn't start up properly because it needs mysqld, and everything looks good.

Back down to the crawl space.  He thinks the igniter's bad.  I suspected at first that the igniter was bad, too, but that's not what the diagnostics say.  We work on it some more and he discovers that one of two redundant induced-draft vacuum sensor switches has failed.  If we bypass the failed sensor with a jumper, the furnace immediately lights.  He doesn't have a replacement in his truck.  Neither does Eastern Propane have a replacement in their warehouse.

We leave it at that for the time being.  He gives me all the information I need to find the replacement part, keeps a copy in case I can't find one, and leaves.  As a temporary workaround, I bypass the failed sensor (since there are two identical¹ redundant sensors in series) to get the furnace back online for now.

By now it's time to go pick up the Silly Goose, so I go do that.  When we get back, I get on the phone and book the U-Haul trailer we need to go pick up the couch we're being given by friends in Deerfield.  I schedule pickup for 16:00, then make coordinating phone calls etc, and find that won't work because DJ won't be home until 19:00.  I call U-Haul back and reschedule pickup for 17:30.

  Then I start hunting for the correct replacement vacuum sensor.  There isn't one to be found that looks correct, and a well-known web search engine returns zero hits for the part numbers on the existing Honeywell parts.  I finally find a local HVAC shop that gives me the correct lennox part number, which also returns zero hits.  They're closing for the day, but think they should be able to order one on Monday.

Setting that aside until Monday, we go off to pick up the trailer, getting there pretty much right at 17:30 because people in 4x4s are slowing down to 20mph on 11A to dodge scary frost heaves.  Eisbär² just takes them in his stride.  I insert the drawbar that we bought last week into the hitch receiver, having to clear a little rust from the retaining pin hole ... and discover that although I checked the drawbar for fit at the time, with the ball installed it's too short.  There's no clearance between the ball and the bumper for the tongue.

Turns out the VIP Auto Parts a mile down the road has a fractionally better selection of drawbars than the one we bought from.  They have one long enough, but I don't have a wrench with me to swap the ball over.  That turns out to be rather moot anyway, because by now it's too late to pick up the trailer today.  We call Deerfield, postpone, and head home, updating cymrullewes by phone on the way, who informs me that the package she stopped off to pick up in Merrimack because it was shipped to the wrong address wasn't the package we knew got shipped to the wrong address — it was a different package that also got shipped to the same wrong address...

Murphy, you jerk, are you done yet for today?

[1]  Except that one of them works.

[2]  More on Eisbär later.