Lookee, Mabel! It’s a real Live Blizzard!

I know I’ll make my Alaskan reader yawn, but it’s a real storm here.  Like the kind when I was a kid.  The snow is already deeper than the dogs are tall.  
I have Velveeta and chili dip on my mind. That’s a college thing.  As long as you have cheese and chips, you’ll survive the storm.
I’ll have to check out The Weather Channel later to see what’s up — and plan for the evening.

Sent from my Palm Pre on AT&T

Do We Have a Deal?

Memorandum

December 10, 2010

To:  My Family
From:  Fed-Up Carol Anne/Mama
Re:  Agreement

If I agree to work a full-time job plus a part-time job to keep a roof over our heads, bills paid, refrigerator stocked and some other fun stuff, plus do some laundry and cooking, can you agree to the following?

  • Pick up the crap you leave lying around the house.
  • Take out the dogs occasionally and clean up after them.  Thoroughly, and not by rubbing a piece of paper towel around with your foot.
  • Fold and put away the laundry.
  • Keep the sidewalks and driveway clean.
  • Clean your rooms.
  • Take out the trash daily .
  • Not complain, roll your eyes, or make gestures when I point out that you haven’t followed through on what you said you would do “in a minute”.

If this arrangement is not suitable to you, I will have to make other arrangements.  Possibilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Quitting all my jobs and stay home to clean up after you piggies, and letting you guys figure out how to pay the bills and keep a roof over our heads.  Oh, by the way Sarah, Social Security isn’t sufficient to pay all the bills.
  • Take the money I save for fun stuff and putting it toward a weekly cleaning service.  I can’t keep up with your mess.
  • Cutting down drastically on the number of clothes we have around here, so I have much less laundry to do each week.  I get tired of washing your entire closet every week because you’ve decided that if you put something on and take it off immediately, it’s dirty and needs to go on your bedroom floor.

Please let me know which approach you would like me to take.  Letting me know anytime between now and five minutes from now will be sufficient.  You know where to reach me.

What a Way to End November

Got a call last night right before my class that my dad had had a stroke.  Got to walk into my class and let them know I had to go, take the final online, and I gotta go.  I’ve never made 20 people gasp and turn pale all at once.

I spent the evening in the ER.

My dad’s doing pretty good neurologically — speech is fine, no grip/movement loss.  Crazy heart beat, so they kept him overnight.  I think they’ll be keeping him more than overnight, but we’ll see what happens.  I’m planning to go visit him at lunch tomorrow.

Thus ends my month of NaBloPoMo.  27 days out of 30, I blogged.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about every day for a whole month, but stuff kept coming up.  Whether it was useful, or entertaining, remains to be seen.  But I had fun.

On to December.

Another RBOC Night

  • Second-to-the-last day of NaBloPoMo.  Can’t believe I did as well as I did — I’ve only missed three days this month.
  • “… and then a miracle occurs …” seems to be SOP at the day job right now.  Trying to be helpful, but really not wanting to be part of the mayhem.
  • The Big Storm is probably going to be all rain, no snow.  Goodbye for now, White Christmas.
  • John put up the Christmas lights outside.  He just did it — I didn’t say anything about when or timing or anything.  What’s up with that.
  • Of the frivolous ballot rejections in Hennepin County (MN Gov. Race Recount), 95% of them came from the Emmer side.  Can’t figure out which race is crazier:  MN Gov or AK Sen.
  • Last Business Writing class tomorrow night.  Two more Web Design classes to go.  Let the grading frenzy commence.
  • I still love my new bathroom.

$300 Furnace Lesson

After a pretty good Thanksgiving, and an absolutely fabulous Black Friday, I was looking forward to a quiet Saturday.  Just a few errands to run, check in on my classes, do some laundry, etc.

While doing the check in with my classes this morning, Sarah kept complaining she was cold.  After a 1/2 hour of complaining and trying to walk her through adjusting the thermostat, I noticed I was getting cold.  So I go downstairs to check on the thermostat and notice the house temp is a chilly 63 degrees.  I play with the thermostat.  I can’t get the furnace to kick in.

I go to the basement, no noise from the furnace.  So I call John, who is at his church job, practicing.  He has me change the fuse.  Still nothing.  I flip the power to the furnace.  Nothing.  So, I call the furnace company and have a service call put in — on the 6 year old furnace.  Yell to the kids to put on warmer clothes and find the dogs sweaters, etc.  I give the furnace a swift kick, and head back to the main floor.

By the time I get back to the main floor, I notice the furnace has started and is emitting a strange odor.  I turn it off at the thermostat, and go back downstairs.  I have Rachel start it again from the thermostat, and the furnace makes some gawd-awful noises for five minutes, and then it starts.  The furnace starts a cycle of short on periods, and long off periods.  After two hours, the temp has risen all of 2 degrees in the house.

Furnace guy shows up, checks the thermostat (OK), then goes to the basement.  Touches a few things on the furnace and diagnoses the problem:  the furnace filters are clogged.  So we move some stuff around so he can get into where the filters are, and as soon as he removes the filter, the furnace goes quiet — but is running.

The filter is CAKED with gray fuzz and stuff.  Rachel and I concurred that we could make a very large dust bunny, and have enough left over to make a couple dust Scotties.  The furnace guy really cleaned it out well, using our ShopVac, and happened to have some new, clean filters in his truck.  I watch him very carefully, ask a bunch of questions, planning to get my money’s worth out of this very simple service call.  He was great, straight-forward, and didn’t make me feel like an idiot.  I now know how to do the monthly filter cleaning.

15 minutes later, all is replaced, cleaned, and running happily. The furnace guy leaves with $300 of our emergency fund.  Thank God for emergency funds.

Two hours later, John returns home, and I inform him of the diagnosis and the bill.  He says he cleaned it two months ago, but I really wonder … the filter was caked with dust and stuff.

It’s clean now, and I know what to do.  It was a spendy lesson, but I guess that’s what I really needed to do today.  Oh, and I apologized to the furnace for kicking it.  I hope it was accepted.
 

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