Off Again

The heat went back off last night.   On the fritz, busted, malfunctioning or plain broken.   But it hasn’t been that bad.   The temperature delta across the rooms is interesting, but not extreme.   Our bedroom only got down to sixty-four degrees last night but walking out into the main room through one door and you’re hit with what feels like summer weather just because of a few degrees difference.

I’ve been running the other two systems at a higher temperature so that the flow over to the other rooms will make more difference but that causes us to be too warm in some parts of the house and chilly in other parts.   It’s confusing knowing what to wear—unless you’re a child, and then you don’t seem to notice.

We’re doing New Year’s Eve quietly tonight with one family coming over with their children.   Our sitter is coming over too so we’ll see if she can keep them busy until midnight.   Speaking of, I need to see if we have some New Year’s hats and noise makers in the attic I can pull down when I finish this post.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Too Loud Commentary:   Our neighbor is lighting some fireworks as I write this.   For some reason my children are incensed about this.   They don’t like the noise and have declared Walter a rude person, interrupting other people’s evenings with such a cacophony of sound.

On Again Off Again

Two mornings ago I woke up cold.   Or rather I was cold in the middle of the night.   I turned up the temperature on the thermostat but it wasn’t heating to a temperature I should have been cold with.   Then in the morning I was colder still, only the thermostat wasn’t set to anything other than normal.   So I brought up my iPad and looked for details and got concerned.

The master bedroom temperature was set correctly, only it was fifty-nine degrees in the room.   The basement temperature was a bit warmer, what with it being half underground, but it was still cold—and the heat was not in fact on.    The main floor wasn’t responding at all, saying the thermostat was too low on power to report at all and the upstairs thermostat was happily heating, only it was on auxiliary heat.     What was going on?

I went out to the living room and sure enough, the thermostat wasn’t even powered.   So I woke up my husband and told him we had a problem.    While he was in the basement I looked up the setting on the second floor heat pump system and found out the report I was getting was accurate and correct given the outside temperature was as low as it was.   So at least we had one out of three systems working correctly.  

My husband came upstairs about that time and said he’d figured out what happened in the basement.   When we converted our mechanical room to a game and work room there was a switch that could look like a light switch off to the side, but was in fact the switch to turn off the heating system—and that’s what had happened.   Without power to the system, even the thermostats had no power.   The main floor system and thermostats were back online and my husband had plans to mark the switch for the future.  

Now we had two systems online and working correctly, but the third system was stubbornly not working.   He got into the crawl space and checked the condensate pump, that being a component we’d had troubles with in the past on one of the other systems.    That was fine, switching the unit off and on was fine but there was a pesky light blinking saying there was a pressure switch failure (whatever that was).    After about a half hour of tinkering in a land in which my husband has little experience he said to call the company.

They could come out later in the day and when the technician arrived in the afternoon it turned out there was power going into one of the circuit boards but not coming out of it.   An expensive part was ordered and we were told it would be Tuesday until the part came in.   So five days without heat to the two areas that unit heated: the master and the basement.  

We got a fan and circulated some heat for the night and everyone was reasonably warm.   It wasn’t too much of a problem with the other two systems taking up for the one that was down.    And then this afternoon I noticed the heat on in the master.   Back on.   Working as expected.  

We don’t know what the issue was, but we’ll find out more when the technician comes back out on Tuesday.   For now, I don’t have to sleep with several blankets added on top of my sheets, and for that, I’m happy.

The Big Boy Update:  My husband and son have decided to watch all the Star Wars movies in order over the holiday break.   Tonight they watched Revenge of the Sith.  My son was very engaged, mostly doing parkour around the basement while the movie played.   At one point when Anakin walked into a room with children training to become Jedi my son did get upset and started chanting, “don’t kill the kids, don’t kill the kids”.  At the end of the movie he handled Anakin becoming Darth Vader because he already knew it was going to happen.    I thought the movie would have scared him a lot, but my seven-year-old son isn’t as easily scared as he would have been a year ago.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter laid down in a ball on the floor in a pile of blankets she made for herself and told my husband she wasn’t going to make it through Star Wars because she was tired.   She wanted to know if he could carry her upstairs when the movie was over.    I packed up Christmas decorations and missed her sleeping but he dutifully carried her to bed once the movie had finished.

Annual Playlist Time

I have a playlist that’s been persistent on my devices since 2012.   Anything I download I put into this playlist because if I’m downloading it, I want to have it handy to play.   I don’t download album after album where the playlist would become unmanageable, it’s mostly some hits one at a time and a few albums here and there.  

Because of that the playlist stays relatively manageable.   But at the end of each year I have a reminder on my calendar to remove all the songs that aren’t that I’m not as interested in anymore—meaning I’ve overplayed them.  

I’m down to only thirty songs now.   It’s not a bad way to start the new year; I’m ready to find new music to add.

The Big Boy Update:  There was a restaurant we were talking about going to for lunch named, ’Spanky’s’.   My son asked, “does it mean that people that work there spank everyone?”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  A package arrived yesterday.   My daughter asked her friend, Madison, if she could read the letters to her so she would know who the package is for.   She can spell very well and knows a lot more about reading than her brother in many ways.

Full House Again

My husband’s brother’s family are visiting.   We’ve had a lot of visitors this month, which has been nice.  January is going to feel lonely in comparison.    My in-laws came to visit today too.  Sometimes more people is more fun.  

We decided on a new mission today—plan a family vacation over Christmas for next year.  

The Big Boy Update:  I told my son there were a few peanuts in the Chex Mix and to watch out for them.   As I said it I was holding up one of the peanuts.  My son looked at it and said, “I didn’t know what a peanut looked like.”  He’s allergic, but I never realized he hadn’t seen a peanut (or been told what it is) before.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter’s nose is runny again.    This morning she was getting a tissue for the second time.  I told her she could take the box with her.    She reminded me of Mimi when she said, I put some more in my pocket.

Looking Left

I have neck/spine/back issues.   This is well known.   Some things I know about while others I notice or discover over time.   We break down and wear out as we get older.   There are things we can fix with surgery or help with medication but the slow deterioration of our bodies marches on with time.

I remember when I was in junior high school swinging in the hammock in the back yard.   I would look left a lot because the road was there and I was looking for friends to ride by on their bikes or arriving home in the cars of their parents.    I think that’s my first memory of being left preferential in a direction to look or rotate my neck.  

Likely whatever injury had happened to my neck was years before this time from gymnastics or several other incidents my parents and I identified as we reviewed my childhood.   Later the damage would cause me to have two spinal fusions and I live with pain in varying degrees most of the time.

I’ve noticed that looking at my phone I hold it with my left (dominant) hand but I also look down and to the left because it’s more comfortable.   Fine, that might just be a hand or side of the body thing, but then I noticed when I write these blog posts that I put the window on the left side of the screen.  

There is no reason I need to do this.   I could easily put the window right in the middle of the screen, but I rarely do.   I don’t know why looking left is more comfortable, but it’s rooted in decades of body deterioration and damage.   At least it’s comfortable—I won’t argue with that.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son didn’t want to go to bed tonight because his aunt, uncle and cousins came to town this afternoon.   He complained bitterly when I told him he had to go to bed, “but I want to party!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has a head cold.  She’s the only one in the family with is (so far) but it’s wrecking havoc on her nose, especially as she wipes her nose continually on whatever shirtsleeves is handy.   She’s gone to sleep early two nights in a row.   I think this is mostly due to the Benadryl I’ve been giving her, but she’s been tired as well.

Luminary Donation

We had our neighborhood luminary event earlier in the month.   I collected checks and cash donations and today I took the total to the local Ronald McDonald house.  My best friend and I choose this charity because my daughter’s pediatric ophthalmologist said it’s a location they’ve had many patients stay at in the past.   I didn’t want to do something completely vision related, so this worked for me.  

I parked and was talking to the person at the front desk about our donation when I realized a friend was sitting in front of the large, roaring fire in the entry hall.   Bill was the business manager at my children’s school for the first three years we went there.   He retired and not unlike many retired people, still wanted to do something.   He started out volunteering a few hours here and there and now works part-time.

He offered to take me on a tour.   Since I had no idea about anything they did I accepted.    He showed me the quad kitchen which was four full kitchens around a huge island and a row of refrigerators.   Cabinets surrounded the room with labels such as, ‘soup’, ‘macaroni & cheese’, ‘peanut butter & jelly’ were labeled among other things.  

But food is also brought in for lunch and dinner if you want to eat in the dining room, he told me.   There were people bustling around, some making cupcakes, some having conversations in the dining room.   It felt welcoming and comfortable—not like a hotel at all.  

There was a large conference room filled with toys and things for children from newborn to eighteen. They receive about $900,000 of their three-million dollar operating budget from gifts in kind.   Families got to pick whatever they wanted from the toy room for their child and possibly siblings that might be staying there for a week or up to a year even.   The gifts in kind aren’t just toys.   They have 15,000 paper towel rolls and another 15,000 containers of wipes donated every year.   

We went down the hall so he could show me one of the rooms and he told me about the ceiling tiles.   Every family that stays is given a tile and asked to decorate it however they want and then it’s hung down the halls.

The rooms themselves had their own kitchen, washer and dryer included and came with a welcome bag that included all the basic toiletries you might possibly need.   This is a common need, Bill told me, as sometime families arrive and have nothing with them because their child was life flighted from  a city far away or even out of state.   They had a family who came in last week who had no clothes other than what they were wearing.  

I hope we would never need the services offered by the Ronald McDonald house, but it’s very nice to know it’s there for people who need it.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son was spending time with his older friend, Gavin, last week.   There was a lot of giggling as he would ask us what “sex” meant and then when the adults completely failed to get what he was talking about by explaining all about gender, he would try again and ask us if we knew what, “cock” meant?   We were all apparently dense on that word as well, exasperating him but not stopping his giggles. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  When my daughter was washing her hands at my sink she looked forward into the mirror and said, “I never saw a sink over there before” pointing to the sink’s reflection in the mirror.   Sometimes I’m struck by what she can’t see.   I guess I’m glad she’s seeing it now. 

Boxes Are More Fun

So it’s Christmas day and we had a lot of fun as a family.   There was chaos, there was mess, there was food and singing of carols and opening of presents.   Now the day is over and the first thing I’d like to say is a big thank you to every adult member of my family who likes to keep things neat and clean.    At the end of the day I’m sitting down here at my computer and everything is put away, the dishes are washed, the linens are in the dryer, the toys are all put in their place and the general hubbub of Christmas has been tamed.   My family is the best.

My daughter got a red Tesla Model S child-sized car and my son got a hoverboard.   And they were both very happy about their presents—my daughter being the most excited of everyone.   But there were big boxes and those proved to be more fun during the opening of presents.   We had to stop opening presents for a while so that my son could get into the big box, Nana could close him in and my daughter could write in sharpie on the box To: and From: so that my son could be a present.   Then, breaking from the present theme, we all sang Pop Goes the Weasel song and my son would pop out of the box on queue.   Eventually we got back around to presents, but that saying about the boxes being more fun than the presents is still true at ages six and seven.

The two boxes that were large enough to fit my children in were from the “American Falcon” my husband got.    My daughter was calling it that, confusing everyone until we told her it was the Millennium Falcon.   My husband and son love Legos.   The boxes were so big because the Lego model is the largest Lego has ever made.  I don’t remember how many pieces, but if the boxes are any indication, it’s a lot.

My husband worked in the kitchen most of the afternoon, making appetizers, a turkey and side dishes.   At one point he got on my son’s hoverboard, having mastered riding it quickly, and said, “I think I’m going to cook with this thing so I don’t have to walk.”   The hoverboard takes a bit to get used to, but it is pretty fun.

Fun day.  Happy children.  Happy family.  I’m very fortunate.

The Big Boy Update:  Nana had set the two tables for dinner so that eight adults would be in the main dining room and she would be with my two children at the breakfast table.   My son caught on though and said in a loud voice while pointing to his table, “we need more population at this table”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This morning I told my daughter I had to brush her hair.   I said it was Christmas morning and we were going to be taking pictures so her hair should at least be brushed.   She got angry and complained, “I don’t want to take Christmas pictures, we took Christmas pictures last year!”