Bridge freezes before road surface usually

Here is another scene. It’s New Year’s Eve day—today in fact. I’d been rushing around for the past week of my ‘vacation’, shopping, spending hours in the basement rearranging junk into more appealing piles of junk, blowing an afternoon cleaning out a bookcase—removing some books to make room for still other books, getting rid of various bits of paper stuck here and there: generally not ‘vacating’ much at all.

Today it must have caught up to me because a couple of hours after Kathy left for work, I fell asleep in my chair for an hour. Then I was still tired so I went up to the nice cozy warm waterbed and slept for another hour. Coming downstairs, I thought it seemed a little chilly, so I checked the thermostat. Set for 66 degrees, the room temperature had dropped to 63. The furnace had quit working.

It was twenty degrees outside with wind blasting the house with forty mile an hour gusts, producing an uncomfortable wind chill, and the house was cooling fast, hitting 58 degrees very quickly.

So I called the people who had installed the furnace, the same people who had serviced it in the fall, and thankfully they were able to get a guy out here in about an hour. It turned out to be the same man who had worked on it in September. He got it working in short order and said I should probably replace the doppelganger doohickey and the frissen mast chunk-a-blunk and I agreed. He went back to his truck, called his boss and explained the situation. The upshot was they did not charge me for the parts, just the labor to install them which was great news given the price of doohickeys these days.

By that time, Kathy was home from work. So what, right? Well, you don’t understand. Kathy hates to be around when someone is working on the house. She really had nowhere else to go, so she had to break one of her rules and stay in the house while the furnace guy worked. It turns out that she was so distracted by a harrowing escape she had had on the highway, that she wouldn’t have cared if John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were tinkering with the heating system.

We had some snow overnight and the wind kept spreading it around over the roads, such that some stretches were fine, while others were fit for a Red Wings-Rangers game. The past couple of days, I had accompanied Kathy to work so I could run around in the car doing useless errands, but today she ventured out alone. She made it to work driving very slowly along the treacherous mountain passes in the eight miles between our house and her office. (OK, but the road does take a little dip there at that one point.)

She decided to take the “Big Girl” way home on the interstates—something she rarely does. There is a tricky bit where three highways converge and no one ever yields to anyone else lest they appear weak. Some character came whipping past Kathy going about 70 when he hit a hockey rink strategically placed at the merge. He spun violently around, hit the gas and ran up the hillside whereupon clouds of white smoke issued ominously from under his hood. Tree branches festooned the fuselage as he flattened two tires. Undaunted, he slide back down to the highway and tried to continue his mad dash. The car would have none of that, though, and he mercifully gave up and limped to a stop alongside the road.

Her heart in her throat, our terrified heroine wisely eased up on the gas and watched this solo ballet unfold before her, all the time fearing that the crazy driver would carom into her car next. She came home full of her tale of horror on the highways, and regaled our guests with all the details later that evening.

Everyone went home early this year, so it’s a quiet New Year’s. Every year we say why bother to stay up? and every year we’re standing in front of the TV as the ball drops. I wish my readers (all two of you) a year in which you have everything you need, and even a few things you don’t really ‘need’ need; and a year in which you make even more progress in your spiritual journey. And let’s have some fun along the way. See you next year.