Ahhh...

For once, and I do mean for once, our apartment manager actually got on the ball and dealt with something immediately (have I mentioned that our shower is still broken and the only actual shower I've had in the last month and a half was in a hotel? It was amazing, by the way. I almost cried). Dave called at 9pm and the manager showed up the next morning and got the pilot going on the furnace.

Happily, that did indeed prove to be the only issue with our heat, and things warmed up promptly and have stayed that way. At this point, the only radiator that still isn't working is the one in our bedroom, and since I have mentioned in the past that Dave is a human radiator once he falls asleep, that isn't too much of an issue.

So, our house is warm and cozy, my brother in law is staying with us for the week, which is rad because it means an extra person to hang out with, and things are good.

But, it's 10:30, and I am old, which means it's time to go to bed.

House Woes

Le sigh. Ok, we don't really have house woes--our current problem does not amount to a woe, at least not yet, because we believe we know what the problem is.

When we moved in, the gas man came to light the pilot for our water heater/boiler et cetera and asked Dave if he should also light the furnace while he was down there (the house having three separate boilers and furnaces for the three separate tenants). Because it was the dead of summer, Dave said not to bother, and we continued on our merry way.

However, now it is not the dead of summer. It is the dead of Autumn, and Autumn in Cleveland is a chilly thing indeed. Our way, at least momentarily, is somewhat less merry than before. We went down to West Virginia this weekend for the wedding of our good friends Bill and Jenn, and then spent a night in Pittsburgh to hang out with old college buddies, and when we came back, our house was so cold that it required socks, four layers of clothes, an hour of cooking in the kitchen and a hot drink for me to reach a point where I felt like I was actually inside of a building and not standing outside in a remarkably breeze-free zone.

Unfortunately, the residual heat from cooking dinner did not last through to this morning, when dragging myself away from a pile of blankets and a husband who sheds heat like a furnace in the night became almost impossible, and made my teeth chatter.

This is a problem that has to be solved. I don't like to be hot, but I don't like to be freezing, either. Also, Dave's brother is staying with us this week and I feel bad having the house be a refrigerator when we have a guest.

Thankfully, it's a relatively easy problem to solve, now that we've put our heads together and remembered what we didn't have someone do in the summer. We put a call in to the landlord and asked if he could send someone to light up the furnace so that it can get hot and send hotness up from the basement to warm us.

If he has not come by the time I get back from work, I will be grumpy enough to consider going down into the Big Scary Basement and trying to figure out how to do it myself.

Potpourri

My dad and my brother both came down with the influenza, apparently. However, because my mom is a ninja and reads the same interesting things that I do (because we have the same Facebook friends, in this case), they've all been taking elderberry, which, as you may recall, is a magic gypsy remedy against the flu and all other diseases ever. As a result, my brother's already back in school and my dad was only really sick for a couple of days and is now just dealing with hoarseness and sinus congestion but not actual flu flu.

I am buying elderberry extract immediately. For serious. Apparently it tastes delicious, which is how you know it has to be magic, because since when does medicine taste good? Since gypsies invented it, that's since when.

Yesterday, I bought a sweater at Target. It was $20 on sale for $15 and tomorrow, after I get paid, I am going back to Target and buying the four other colors that they had, because it is a delicious and cozy sweater, and I'm a sweater addict.

One of my goals this year is to knit a sweater. I'm starting out slow with the knitting projects, though. For instance, in August and early September I knitted one (1) fingerless glove. That was to practice cabling, which you should look up on our good friend google. I didn't make a second glove, but I meant to. Now I am knitting two (2) socks.. that is to say, I'm working on a sock and hopefully will not be so bored with it by the time it's done that I refuse to start the second. Inertia is strong in knitting.

But next, oh, next I will attempt to knit a sweater. I feel like there is some degree to which one is not actually a knitter per se until something of that magnitude has blossomed forth from the needles.

Once again, I am delaying my leave for work until the very last possible moment, which means snuggling in bed with the computer and my husband under our heavy pile of blankets. The house is freezing, because we still haven't figured out how the heat works. When I woke up this morning, my teeth started chattering as soon as I made my exit from beneath the aforementioned blanket pile.

It isn't that I don't like my job, and I love making money, but it's so cold and 7:15 is so early in the morning to get up and 9 hours is a long day and you can insert more whining here. It gets repetitive after a while, I know.

I will bottle it all up inside of me for the rest of the day, and nobody will know. Except for you.

Le Sigh

The alarm goes off every morning at 7:10. This is so that we can hit the snooze button once. A man named John Saunders once devoted three or four pages to describing the delicious half-asleep feeling of knowing that you have to get out of bed soon, but also knowing that you don't have to get out of bed yet, and being awake enough to enjoy it but sleepy enough to still be cozy and warm.

All of that is true, of course. The best part of the whole night is snuggling under the covers while the alarm is snoozing.

The problem is, eventually you can't hit snooze anymore. And then I'm sad, because all I really want to do today is stay in bed with Dave (who is burrowing further under the covers and making sleepy grunting noises next to me while I write this). I want to stay in bed all day and then get up around maybe six or seven, get some dinner, and then come back home and go upstairs to watch House on our neighbor's TiVo at eight.

Sadly, the only part of that which will actually happen is the bit about House, which is going to be rad, but really was the least attractive part of that whole mental picture.

Instead I will go to work, and I'll have fun and I'll feel good about it, but most of me will be lying in bed asleep next to my husband, who I love more than anything, feeling warm and cozy.

Oh well. Maybe tomorrow the stay-in-bed-all-day fairy will like me better.