The furnace has been turned on and is now warming up! And my new thermostat talks. Its quite interesting, now we have the ability to turn the house up and down depending on time of day, or day of week. Its really cool… well… warm… you get the idea!

Well, as I write this our furnace is half-installed. Our technician headed out about an hour and a half ago to go get some conduit cut to connect our new furnace to the existing ductwork and he still hasn’t shown back up.

He’s still gotta get this thing all hooked back together, run the new thermostat, and get the inspector back out here to test the CO level again. Hopefully he’ll have it all wrapped up today, I really don’t want to spend any more time being cold!

The city inspector just stopped by to look at where he was in the process and pointed out that we needed a different kind of line running to our dryer, which is interesting because it was put into place in 1987 which is well after the house was inspected the first time (so says the tag attached to the hose). He also had some beef about one of the outlets that was run for an electric dryer that used to be down there. The inspector said we could deal with those things at a later date, but I’m going to ask the guy from TroubleFree what it would take to get that stuff done now (or soon).

*sigh* Why can’t anything just be easy?

Yep, so we decided to stay with TroubleFree and go with a new 80% efficiency variable-speed Amana furnace. We would’ve gone with one of the ultra high efficiency furnaces but the lady said that usually involves ductwork/chimney upgrades as well and it would “get expensive fast”.

The lady explained to me that the new unit will be more BTU’s than my current furnace and the fact that it is so old meant it was probably only operating around 60% efficiency anyway. She assured me that we’d have no problem having a warm house after they were done.

It is going to end up costing $3400. We were able to come up with a $1300 down payment, so we are only taking a $2100 backslide on our debt repayment. Not that bad considering we’re heading into incentive pay, tax return, and apparently this weird government refund deal that they’re trying to pass off as a good thing.

Either way, they start installing our new furnace at 9 am tomorrow morning! Real heat will be nice! Thanks to everyone that offered space heaters and well-wishes! Tasha and I both appreciate it!

Looks like we’re going to end up with a new furnace! The people from TroubleFree Heating and Cooling came out to inspect our furnace and found that it was so caked with soot and buildup that his telescoping camera couldn’t make out whether or not our heat exchanger was cracked or damaged.

He said that cleaning the unit would cost between $600-$800 and take 4-6 hours, and he said that then they would have to inspect the furnace again after it was cleaned in order to determine if there was any structural damage. He said that there were indications of a crack that had been fixed once with the unit, and his recommendation was to put the 36 year old furnace out to stud.

He said you could conceivably drop $1000 easily in getting it cleaned and re-inspected, and that’s a pretty good down payment on a new furnace.

I must say that this is a bit of a setback for our debt repayment, as the first time we’ve ever had to kill our emergency fund. Luckily, they do financing through Cefcu so we should be able to get the balance handled but hopefully we will be able to scrape together enough to make the financed portion somewhat negligible. That value will go right into our debt snowball and we hopefully won’t miss much of a beat.

I’m thankful to have found this problem before it involved any injuries/deaths, and I’m thankful that we have our emergency fund to help offset the pain of getting a new furnace. Here’s to hoping the cost isn’t going to be all that astronomical!

I have to say I’m very pleased with the service that I’ve received from TroubleFree so far… the guy even went back to their shop and provided some space heaters so we didn’t freeze overnight. The technician was also extremely thorough in explaining what was wrong, where the cost was coming from, and what our options were. We’ll know more tomorrow!

I came home today to find my carbon monoxide detector alarming. I would’ve immediately assumed that it was the batteries and not a real problem, except for the fact that we changed the battery a few days ago when the thing went off unexpectedly.

I relocated one of the very old CO detectors into our bedroom where the alarm was going off and it didn’t go crazy, so I called the fire department to ask them what to do. They asked a bunch of questions and then sent a truck out to check on us. Apparently it is protocol to call the Pekin City Inspector to check it out.

He came in, turned up the furnace, and took the faceplate off of our furnace to find FIRE ESCAPING THE FIRE BOX. The CO meters jumped up above the safe limit, and they informed us we needed to have this looked at TONIGHT and not turn on the heat again until it was fixed, because chances were very good that the fire would melt the aluminum gas line and blow us the hell up.

I’m talking 20d6 damage fireball, people.

So now the house is getting cold and one of the fine people at TroubleFree Heating and Cooling are on the way over to see if they can fix it. Scary.

Also, this is yet another excellent example of when having an emergency fund is a good thing. Let’s hope its enough!

Tonight, we were one of a few thousand Ameren customers in my area that was affected by a sub-station outage that took my power out from 6 pm until around 10 pm. As a result, Tasha busted out her giant supply of candles and we lit this place up pioneer-style.

I really like candlelight, and I have for a very long time. I recently saw an ad for Glade Wisp flameless candles and I can’t really say that I get why we’ve taken technology to this strange market. For those of you that don’t know… its a LED flickering light with a little puffer thing that sprays scent to emulate the candle burning. Candles have been around for thousands of years, and they still work as well today as they did way back then.

Now, before you go off and give me the “but I rent my place and we can’t have candles so they work for me” line… I get it. It is just very apparent to me that either a.) I am not the target market or b.) this is a stupid product for anyone except those in the aforementioned situation.

Now the nerd in me says, “wow, that’s cool.” But the logical side of me says that this thing costs 3x what a regular candle of the same size and doesn’t have the satisfying feature of actually being on fire. Just seems not quite right to me, but what do I know? 🙂

Well, today we unexpectedly bid farewell to Heath Ledger. I really enjoyed him in A Knight’s Tale, and it is a shame that his life ended so soon. I don’t understand why or how someone could overdose on medication, or what could’ve possibly been so bad in his life that it would have to end this way, but there ya have it… sometimes life is weird that way.

Tasha and I have some errands to run so I’m out of karate tonight, I’ll pick up on Thursday and Saturday and hit it hard again next week to make up for the miss.

Well, Teddy had a grand total of five seizures last night. They got further apart and less severe as the night went on, the last one he had was 7:30 pm yesterday. We kept him upstairs by us so we could take care of him if he had another one, but he slept through the night comfortably and seems to be very much himself today.

I gave him a bath to clean the stink off of him, and right now he’s begging the pizza that I am having for lunch just like he normally would. I think he’s going to be OK, and I hope its another two years before this happens again.

Thanks for all the concern and well wishes!

Nothing like a little excitement to start off Sunday morning. Teddy had three seizures within an hour and a half, which classifies them as cluster seizures. We were told if this every happened again (it has happened before) we were to take him to the emergency clinic for treatment.

Last time, they gave him syringes of Valium to administer rectally if he had big seizures and that’s what they did this time as well. Since he had recovered very well, they didn’t give him any medicine at the emergency clinic but they sent us home with two more syringes to use as needed.

They were quite perplexed at the ER when we told them that we had asked our vet for some to have on hand and we were refused due to the regulation on valium and the extra paperwork that would have to be done. They said that if it worked, they were surprised that the vet wouldn’t WANT us to have some on hand. I agree, and I think its time to look for a new vet. The head doctor at our vet’s office is great, however since we started getting delegated to this new lady on staff it hasn’t really been the same level of care.

Teddy is doing just fine now… he’s resting and seems pretty comfortable.

This is yet another situation when having an emergency fund is an excellent thing. Not having to care about where the money is going to come from to give your pet emergency care is a real blessing.

Today’s workout was our standard Saturday fare, but we had a few more people this time. We did normal basics, gyaku kihon, and stance training. I was able to handle two sets of kibadachi with on my back: 32 seconds the first set and 28 the second.

We all were feeling a bit off today… for me my stance was weak and my timing was all off. Even though, the down times are part of the improving process and we muscled through them. We did a few different stance drills today, one of which involved wearing me like a backpack. Thankfully, I’m a little on the light side and there wasn’t really anyone there that I could’ve had reciprocate that type of training.

We briefly contemplated going outside and training in the frigid weather, but we elected not to for the sake of… well… continued life. It was a good workout today, despite the difficulties.