B-r-r-r-r-r-r

It seems that following 2007, the Year of the Small Appliance Breakdown, 2008 wants to one-up 2007, starting out with a furnace failure. Yesterday, Sunday, I left the house at about 9:30 after shutting off the thermostat in order to conserve on natural gas, it being a fairly warm day in the 50's. When I got home I noticed a strange sound which at first seemed to be water running somewhere through the plumbing. Couldn't find any water running indoors, so I went out into the patio and there heard a clackety, rackety sound from up on the roof. It was something wrong with the furnace/AC unit. The only way I could silence it was to cut off its power at the breaker box. Of course that meant shutting the whole system off, or more simply put, no more heat for Mary. I called my son, Jason, and he checked the offending fan only to find that it wasn't something he could fix. He advised me to talk to his brother-in-law in the morning, as he is manager of a heating and air conditioning supply company. So I bit the bullet, so to speak and made arrangements to manage through the night without heat. It was no where near the problem faced recently by Shyla and family, as our temps get down to the low 30's or high 20's only. But by the time the sun went down, it got pretty chilly. And at bedtime I got out my arctic underwear, put on a pair of sweats, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks and a hat, got out my down comforter and plugged in a heating pad, which fortunately has a timer on it, set it for 2 hours, and crawled into bed all set for the night. I was cozy warm all night and got up in the morning to a 50-degree house. Not all that bad. I just added a jacket, read the paper and ate breakfast and then called Jason's BIL. He was able to connect me with an electrician, who just happened to live on my street (!) and by 2:30 pm he had the bad part replaced and the heat was on again. It cost me only $295, a lot less than I expected, as I had envisioned replacing the whole unit in the thousands of dollars. I counted myself very fortunate when I thought of those sleeping under bridges, on subway grates and in cardboard boxes or those folks in Fargo without heat in winter far colder that here in northern California.