Busy being a Champion

Last week I spent most of my waking daylight hours with my girl C moving her office.

She and her husband run a company that refurbishes/rebuilds/makes magic on fancy high-end cars...cars that have seats in them that cost more than what I used to make in five months. Super fancy. Princes own the cars they work on. Celebrities. Super uber rich people. And moving it all is a rather complicated.

She asked me to come help her move some things. We took care of the front of house stuff, the offices, the desks, the day-to-day stuff. I made some phone calls for her because the last thing she wanted to do was sit on the phone with people. I ran errands to Home Depot and to get foodstuffs for the guys in the shop.

I'm still worried about her mental well being, but going there to do a couple things this morning it looks like she has her bearings about her and the front of house stuff is okay.

She just needs to get the communications system/computers/phone up at the new location ironed out and life will be good. I'd do it for her, but it is way over my head.

Better left to someone with a bigger clue.

In the meantime, we had another school closing last week due to snow and the same day we had a pipe burst in our heating system.

I knew that with the super cold temps over the beginning of the week that our furnace was competing with the cold to just keep the house around 60 degrees. The livingroom was often around 36 degrees in the mornings, and most days I got up at about 4:30am to stoke/refire the woodstove just to stay ahead of the cold. By bedtime, the livingroom would be in the 60s, comfortable indeed but not long lasting with the lack of insulation in that room.

Doug was sitting in the living room drinking coffee at 6:30 in the morning after firing up the woodstove when he heard a bang and HISSSSSSSSSS! Thank God he was there, because Geoff was up here and I was still in bed. Steam was pouring out of one of the three cabinets where we keep our wood for the woodstove (luckily, he'd used that cabinet's worth of wood overnight and it was empty). He could clearly see the breach, and called to Geoff "Hey, go wake up your mother. We have an emergency."

I grabbed my cellphone and started dialing the plumber.

Doug went to the basement to figure out where to turn the water off so it would stop flowing into the room. I grabbed towels and talked to the plumber's answering service. They were here in about an hour, and fixed the four breaks they found in the system, massaged the furnace so it would behave and work, and it all cost us less than $400.

It's a good thing I'd been working for C for a few days because she kept handing me money for my help... so she paid for the repairs in essence. I was going to use that money for a new laptop, but knowing that freezing to death was not an option I needed to pay for the repairs with the recently earned cash.

So now my house isn't Frontier House cold. In fact it is rather hot up here in the study. One can never be happy, can one?

In the meantime, we're expecting another 14-20 inches of snow I guess. I'm off to buy a new shovel because Doug broke our shovel in the last storm. I am not complaining too much about the snowpocalypse because I've after all chosen to live here -- but for the most part, I'm done with this winter and ready for spring.