Our gas bills have just about buried us since we moved into this old house. We’ve done everything we know to do within our budget to get energy efficient, but still…very high bills in the winter. Last week, the motor on one of our furnaces blew up, and the furnace guy who came to fix it may have solved our problem.
Apparently, the motor that blew was jammed with sawdust. When we bought this house, we gutted it, as some of you remember. Wow, was it a wreck. Well, all that crud from tearing down, rebuilding, sanding, etc, settled in the furnace motors, and they’ve been overworking ever since, I guess. That’s part of the problem. But then the furnace guy realized that we had not changed the water filter to our system. Water filter? Those people who lived here before we arrived had had the nerve to both die within a couple of months of one another, and no one knew anything about anything when we moved in (flowers started blooming in the oddest places).
Who knew we had such an elaborate heating system. I mean, I’d already learned that we can’t just buy our air filters off the shelf at Home Depot like regular people. No. We have to go to some special place and buy some heart-stoppingly expensive accordian-like filters that look like big bellows. And we have two furnaces and two air conditioners. This gets expensive. And when the guys come to fix some broken something related to air or heat, they ALWAYS offer to sign us up for the routine maintenance plan, to which Debbie responds, “It’s a racket.” We never get the luxury of maintenance plans. Apparently, it’s all a racket, and we will not contribute…we are not stupid.
So when this nice furnace man discovered that the furnace water filters were seeping something gross all over the furnace, he went out to his truck and came in with fresh ones. When he went to remove the old one, it literally disintegrated in his hands…and it is metal! And very thick…it reminds me of those honeycombed shelves in bee hives. He was aghast. I was embarrassed. Apparently, I’m supposed to change these things each year. So, I’m six years behind. Debbie, brace yourself…I’m signing the bi-annual maintenance contract.
All of this to say that our home became immediately much much warmer. We’ve already turned the thermostats down 2 degrees. I’m ready to drop them another 2. And my feet are bright red at the time of this writing. Hot flash.
Emily Update: For those of you following the events documented here, Emily reported on Sunday that she got a “dream job” last week. It pays $50 per hour. She’s reading actuarial tables or something like that. She’s amazingly brilliant…frankly, she may know more about poetry and literature than I do…who am I kidding? She’s light years ahead of me on this. And she’s elated about her new job. I told her I’d said a little prayer for her…she seemed elated by that, too. It worked so well, I think I’ll pray for something for you. It’s good for me to send positive vibes out into the universe.
Brother-in-law Update: We live. We still haven’t spoken to Deb’s brother, but he did go with his AA sponsor to his mother’s home and had a good and painful talk with her. Which tells me things are headed in the right direction. Working a good AA program leads us to reconciliation. That’s the bottom line.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s almost all about maintenance, isn’t it?
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Not Alice 