Carbon Monoxide!?

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Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...
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It was kind of a gray day for being out in the field. They all can't be brilliant. We went up to Cape Bird which is a very large penguin rookery. I didn't get the time I hoped with the penguins since we were having problems with the equipment, but I still got some really nice shots. I took 219 photos and movies today. The penguins are definately fun to watch. They walk around and they look like they have some place to go and others follow only to all turn around and decide there wasn't anything to see there after all.

I am told the population is approximately 40,000 birds this year. That's a lot of guano no matter what the breed of bird.

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