No more blow by blow

Okay, I’ve stepped away from this long and tedious story, and realized there’s no need to delve into it in any sort of detail. Suffice it to say:

I have been to The Home Depot three times this weekend.

I have spent over two hundreds of dollars. Yes, I said two hundreds, that was not a typo. I am my own little stimulus project, in fact. What does it take get a blue dot at Recovery.gov? This little dot could say, “Betsy tries to warm up the house. Number of jobs created: Unk.”

I have purchased and attempted to install two different thermostats, but the first one had the proper number of wires (4 + ground), but the wires were so much smaller than the old one that it seemed really, really wrong. Implausible that disaster wouldn’t ensue if I hooked the giant cable-ish wires up to the tiny new wire. The second one had the proper gage of wire, but only 2 wires, not 4. I’m sort of looking back at the old one, thinking, hey, maybe I was rash. Maybe we can work things out.



Oh, and that picture? That, my friends, is the tree I decorated with the festive lights, shown at night in all its glory. Um, yes, that’s it. It turns out that solar isn’t really so effective here at this time of year. It worked for about an hour. But I thought I should post the pic, since I purchased 4 strands of lights and put them up and all, involving the ladder and great effort. I don’t know about you, but fa la la, is what comes to mind when I look at that picture.

Speaking of working things out, the teenage boy in my family called me on the phone this morning (from upstairs), to request that I bring him food, and possibly give him a back rub. I know. But we had a little trouble talking on the phone. It would ring and I’d answer but he couldn’t hear me. So I went up there to say good morning, and he was all, “hey, why didn’t you answer?”

“I know! We’re having some communication issues in our relationship, R.”

“Mom, I think our relationship would improve if we started seeing an electrician. It’s too cold in here to get up.”

Which was a valid point, so I started a fire in the woodstove, which is way better than the crappy electric baseboard heating anyway. (Do people still even have electric baseboard heating? Oh wait, I do.) But shoot, does this ever happen to you? You put a log in the fire, and you're just shutting the door when you see a spider. And since the fire is already really underway, the log already has some sparks on it, so you don't want to pull it back out. So you go get a glass to put the spider in, but return and can't find it, because either something bad has already happened, or maybe the spider is just hiding, but you grab the log and pull it out anyway, just in case, looking for the spider, but set off the smoke alarm. I know.

And, just so you know, I'm not usually so I Love Lucy-ish. Seriously. I'm totally competent some of the time. And, in case you're worried, this blog is not going to be like Erma Bombeck on drugs or something. It totally won't be like that.