So, the little weather app on my dashboard says that it’s 39 degrees outside and the little thermometer in my living room says it’s 51 degrees in here. I think it feels more like 39 degrees in here – I’m cold!!
When we discovered the leak from our boiler and called the plumber, I was definitely afraid that we were going to have to replace the whole thing. Afraid, but also hopeful; because if we had to replace the whole thing, then we wouldn’t have the scary possibility looming over our heads for who knows how long. We knew that the house had a 30 year old boiler when we bought it and it was working at the time of the house inspection but since it was so old I assumed we’d have to replace it at some point during our ownership of the house. Well, I mean, I hoped that it would make it, like, another 6 years at least because this is our “5 year plan” house. In 5 years, we’ll be out of debt (woohoo!!!) and since our debt payment is almost as much as our mortgage payment, we’ll be able to afford a nice house like ours in Nisky instead of a scrawny in need of a ton of repairs house like we could have gotten now. 5 year plan. 5 year plan.
But anyway, back to the boiler. When the plumber came out and gave us the diagnosis, I was kind of relieved. I was also happy to hear that with tax credits and rebates from the utility company we’d be getting a high efficiency boiler for less than the price of a normal one – and that both of those prices were much less than I feared. So wee!! New boiler – oh, and since our hot water heater was also wicked old and had no “medium” setting (turn it down to conserve energy and get no hot water! turn it back and get scalding hot water right away!), we decided to replace the hot water heater at the same time. So that’s all well and good… but the first appointment that the plumber had to do the install wasn’t until November 2nd and 3rd. So that sucks.
“But,” we thought, “it hasn’t been that cold this fall – in fact, it was pretty hot in September. So October should be pretty mild – we’ll be fine without heat in October.” I don’t know why I didn’t think of that October before we moved up to NY when there was an epic snowstorm that paralyzed the Capital District. Luckily, it’s just been “on the cold side”. Unfortunately, “on the cold side” feels pretty darn cold when you can’t turn on the heat. Plenty of my friends haven’t turned on their heat yet because they don’t want to pay for heat in October – and I’m sure that if we had the option, we wouldn’t have ours on either. But not having the option sucks.
We’ve been drinking tea and layering clothes. Last night I went to bed wearing leggings, a long sleeved t-shirt, a sweatshirt, and two pairs of socks. I also warmed the bed with a heating pad before I climbed in. Alex thought I was crazy – he wore shorts. We’ve also been building fires now that we’ve had the fireplace cleaned and inspected. It’s Alex’s favorite new thing. He just loves to build and prod and poke a fire. Oh, and throw crap in it. I had flowers that were past their prime – he threw them in the fire. We ate brownies on paper plates in the living room – he threw the paper plates in the fire. He was so excited about the fire that he wanted me to take a picture of it. So I did. Actually, I took a few pictures and a video. Here’s the video, for your viewing pleasure. Doesn’t that just look warm?
I wish I was warm right now. Sigh. To bed!
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Filed under house | Comment (0)I decided to revamp the look of my website this weekend, since I’d resolved to finally move to a new webhost as my hosting fee was coming due. I’ve recently become kind of obsessed with owls (random) so I decided to go with a fall-like owl theme. I couldn’t find any pre-made wordpress themes that fit the bill, so I found a theme and modified the heck out of it with the help of firebug and istockphoto. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I know that probably zero people will ever see it, but since I do this site for no one but myself, that’s A-OK with me. 
As it often happens when I revamp my site, I started to get all reminiscent about the beginnings of my blog. I visited the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org and typed in aliwolly.com. The earliest iteration that popped up was from December 2004 – my pink landing page, which linked out to my photo albums (the older ones were self-hosted) and my blogger blog. So that was fun to poke around in, but then I thought, “Huh. 2004? That’s the earliest?” Then I remembered that my original website was hosted on my PC and used dyndns.com to point a url to my PC’s IP. Yep, turns out I’ve been a geek for a long time. So I threw aliwolly.homeip.net into the wayback machine and found a version of my blog from 2002: pre-blogger. I probably originally built the site in Sept 2001 on tripod.com before I moved it to my PC. It’s completely intriguing that there’s this internet archive project out there and that something as insignificant as my website is archived in it. I guess, so far as websites go, mine could be considered pretty old – “online since 2001!” – but I can’t imagine that it’s interesting to anyone but me.
My old posts are endlessly fascinating to me. I decided to look back at October 2002 – I was pretty verbose that month with 42 posts! – and laughed my ass off reading my posts from 10/13/02. The first one relates a story about a Pizzaria Uno’s dining experience and me pulling a typical Ali move and speaking without thinking. Telling your waiter that your leftover pizza would “smell like ass” is apparently a good way to get it taken off the bill (and embarrass everyone you’re dining with). The second post is about the time that I learned the expression, “Soup to Nuts” in one of my grad school classes – but thought the prof said, “Soupy Nuts” and suppressed giggles ensued. Actually, the whole month of October that year has some pretty good posts – I wish I could get back to writing like that again. Lately work is just all-encompassing and I am so tired by the time I shake work out of my head that I just go to bed. Sigh. Speaking of… Goodnight!
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