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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Already - an adventure for 2016

Greetings and Salutations!
How you be?

I am returning to a semblance of normalcy after collapsing over the Fall Semester "Finish Line" the week before Christmas.
No Holiday cards went out. I didn't get the Christmas lights on the house. {sad}
And no decorations inside the house to tempt the pica-cat palate. {not sad about that one}
Working 6 days a week for the Holidays, attending classes 2 days a week, spending time in the digital lab 2-3 days a week, and monitoring the weaving lab 3 days a week just about did me in!
{I must be getting old.}

It's the 5th day of the New Year and already we had an adventure! An adventure that is inspiring this blog post in more ways than one.

Our adventure appears to have started sometime after midnight after I kissed the DH to welcome in the New Year and then promptly went to bed 'cause I'd been up for 20-mumble hours straight.
When I got up the next morning/the First Day of the New Year, the house was a brisk 57 degrees (14 C). Now we don't heat the house to a without-sweater temperature but 57 degrees clearly indicated the heater was not functioning correctly.

I played with the thermostat and got the heater to come on, but it didn't sound like the gas was running/igniting and there was only cold air coming from the vents. I considered the cost of calling a repair person on a major holiday {shudder/not just from the cold} and began to plot ways to be cold-comfortable so we could hold out until Monday. When the DH got up, I handed him the thick robe I'd made him years ago (that he never wears because he's a guy {which means his personal thermostat naturally runs warmer}) and explained my findings and hold-out plan.

He agreed and referred to our adventure as "camping" for the rest of the weekend.
So we called the repair guy to get into the queue for Monday, put another blanket on our bed (flannel sheets were already in place), broke out the space heaters (one had to be liberated from the shed where it had been stored in a garbage bag), brewed some coffee/hot chocolate, and opened the south-facing front window blinds as we usually do to bring in whatever winter-sun/heat we could.

Our high temperature in the house over the weekend was ... 65 degrees (18 C). The low was the 57 from New Year's Eve. Not bad…but we did get lucky with a sunny weekend. The clouds moved in Sunday night but the repair guy came Monday morning before the first real drop of precipitation or temperature and the house-dragon roared back to life and provided us with some heat for this wet, cold week.

I did a little baking to help warm the house and the cats….their routines didn't change much. At night, they slept on and around us as they usually do and during the day, they enjoyed the winter sunshine as they usually do:
Even Gryphon came to hang out with us (with the
sunshine) in the Living Room.
CooPurr
Brothers Nikoli and Mikale
Purrrrr.
So this blog post was inspired by the heater adventure and…. because I too tend to hang out in the warmest room in the house (the living room) during the winter. However, I'm writing this post where I usually do - in our cold dining room - with the shed-released space heater pointing right at me. ;-)

Happy New Year to you all. 
Let's enjoy what we can of the adventures life sends our way.
Blessings Be.  KiniaCat