One day i came home to find the outdoor thermometer tube lying on the porch. I glued it back up of course but it never worked again. Something had broken internally and the mercury was no longer contained in the chanber it was meant to be. So i got online and began searching for a replacement tube. I learned very quickly that the antique outdoor thermometers like the one my grandmother had given me all had a different type of hook to hang them with so i could not merely buy another one. It wouldn’t fit the current hook system. And the tubes themselves were not sold anymore in that size. I would have had to literally buy an antique ceramic tile thermometer, carefully pry the glass tube off of it, and glue it to mine, rendering the other antique thermometer useless. It seemed like a horrible crime to rob one antique of its parts for another. So i began looking into different thermometers. I looked for a week. I could not find anything that didn’t look tacky. I was searching for “elegant”. They just didn’t make things the way they used to. I could choose between hot pink flowers or a lime green plastic one with no design. There were more of course but it was all the same; tacky or big. I was looking for petite and elegant. Finally i gave up and decided to fix it another way. I ordered ten glass thermometers with a permanent marker line drawn at 70 degrees F. They arrived in my P.O. box. I used super glue to adhere it to my thermometer tile. It was too big for the spot designated so i glued it next to that spot. Then i placed a permanent marker dot every 2 degrees from 70 degrees going up to 120 and down to 0. It still worked perfectly. I just had to look at my marker system and ignore the original one adjacent to it.