Baby, it's cold inside

Rumble, clank, crunch!

That's what awakened Number Guy and me at 3:30 yesterday morning.

While we do live in an older house, I may have mentioned this in past, which has its occasional old-house noises, those particular sounds are not amongst the normal set of noises. They were, in fact, symptoms that something was not right. Number Guy made Miss Clavel look slow as he leaped from bed and clattered down two flights of stairs to the basement where the furnace is located. The horrendous noises ceased when he flipped the furnace's cut switch. The next sound I heard was rushing water: Number Guy had decided to bleed the pipes and then to flip the cut switch to the on position again to test the efficacy of this intervention.

Yes, it was the middle of the night but it is January and the temperature was in the upper teens - we needed heat and he figured that anything he could do was better than doing nothing.

No, flushing the pipes didn't do any good.

It did send an awful lot of very hot water down into the sump pump. Unfortunate, that.

What was I doing at this time? I was on the phone with the furnace repair company with which we have a service contract. Since we have a contract, we were guaranteed service. Since it was same day, we were given an all-day window.

Oh, joy.

Amazingly, Neatnik slept straight on through until regular wake up time.

One would have thought that I could have posted about this yesterday afternoon or last night even but one would be mistaken: I was just too tired. Number Guy went back to bed and back to sleep after the furnace incident. I was wide-awake and ended up working on the lpsz and puttering around as the temperature dropped.

In order to prevent suspense-induced implosion of blog readers, I shall skip all of the shivering and shaking and the careful listing of the things I did outside the house to avoid the cold and the layers of clothing I was wearing to insulate myself against the encroaching cold once I returned home and how much tea I was sucking down in an attempt to warm up from the inside...

Where was I?

Ah, yes, now I remember: the service call.

Sorry about that, the mere memory of the yesterday's thermal deficiencies temporarily chilled my brains.

The service guy called at five to twelve saying that he was en route. An hour or so later, we had a newly repaired water pump and the beginnings of heat spiralling up from the basement.

For free.

Gotta love it when the service contract covers everything.