Cold Snap

Late yesterday afternoon, I realized I was feeling sort of cold, so I got up to check the thermostat, and it was 60 degrees in the house.  I cranked the heat all the way up, but nothing happened.  As in the furnace didn't even turn on.  So in went a call to my heating guys, like 10 minutes before they were set to close.  I got the voice mail, and left a message, and began trying to figure out what to do.  

There's a Lowe's just a little over a mile from here, so I went to its website and ordered space heaters that I could run down and pick up curbside.  I got three: one for the cats' room, one for my bedroom, one for the den.  Now, the last trip I made to Lowe's was to buy all this.  I joked with the woman who brought all that out that there was little doubt what was going on at my house that night.  Made the same joke to a different employee last night.

Finally got a call from the heating company, letting me know that no one would be available to come out until this morning.  Since I had the heaters, that didn't sound quite so bad.  Besides, I had come across these floofy legwarmer-looking socks the other day, and they came in quite handy.

To wrap all this up as quickly as possible: turned out that the "board" of the furnace was broken/burned out.  The "board" is sort of the "brain," and the furnace can't run without it.  And the heating company most likely didn't have one on hand, would have to order one on Monday, and had no way of knowing when it would come in and when they'd be able to come back and put it in.

I pretty much deflated.

Until I realized that the van was staying in the driveway an awfully long time after I'd paid for the service call, and the technician came back to the door to tell me that he'd made a couple of phone calls.  He'd found someone who was willing to go to the warehouse and see if there was a new board, and if there was, he'd get it and come back and install it.

Which they did.  And he did.

My bank account is significantly smaller, but we're all warm.  WHEW.