I think about how many hands must have touched these things before they came to me, how many jobs they helped size, and how many problems they helped solve. Think of all the time they saved — and not one of them needed a battery.

Little kids aren’t the only ones who think like this. People not of this trade often think in a different way than we do. And, sometimes, they even think in a better way.

My daughter Erin, along with her three sisters, grew up listening to me talk nonstop about hydronic heating. Erin recently bought a house with a furnace.

Since heat travels on flow like a passenger on a train, where there is no flow, there is no heat. And it’s going to look just like an air problem. Which it’s not.

It took six firefighters to get the kid out of the duct, and Mama got older. Much older.

I turned 64 in January, and if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. 

The year I served as the potted plant, Sheraton was building a hotel out on Lawn Guyland. This is where things got tricky. 

Unless you get an older steam system working as it should be working, sensors and software will just let you know that something is wrong.

As the noted philosopher Mr. Michael “Iron Mike” Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan, ’til they get punched in the mouth.”

In 1905, a boiler in a Boston shoe factory blew up, traveled a great distance through the air, and landed, with delightful justice, in the front yard of the operating engineer’s house. Think it got his attention?