Thursday: Furnace, Glasses, and a Violin Bow

Being a homeowner has its downside. When you're a renter, you can call maintenance, and gripe about the landlord. In our position, we are maintenance.

Last night, as I was wrapping up some tasks, I thought it was getting chilly. Cold, actually. My first assumption was that I was getting very tired, and feeling the chill more than usual.

Checking the temperature and the thermostat showed me that the house was twelve degrees colder than it should be.

In central Minnesota, in January, that's not good.

The windows were closed and sealed, so were the doors. Then I realized that the furnace wasn't running, and hadn't been for some time. The indicator lights were out: all of them. Back up on the second floor, I noticed that lights in a bedroom and an adjoining toilet were - burned out? At the same time?

Nope. A circuit breaker had tripped, for the first item on that circuit. And, that's the circuit the furnace is on. I know: that's a crazy way to wire a house. It's one of the surprises left from the previous owner's remodeling.

So, I re-set the circuit breaker. The furnace went on right away. Next step: find out why the breaker tripped. The answer was back upstairs. A steamer we hadn't used before was shooting a jet of steam toward the ceiling and making that familiar 60-cycle hum. The thing's electrical cord was warm. I unplugged it, naturally. And, we're not using it again.

And so, to bed.

This morning, I got a call from the place where I'm getting glasses.

Background, to put today's news in perspective: A week ago last Tuesday, I got my eyes checked. Sure enough, I need new glasses. My eyes changed focus when I adjusted my diet, and at this point I see a great deal better without my glasses than with them on. In fact, I've got very decent distance vision now.

New lenses, and frames, were ordered that day, and expected in two to five days.

This week Tuesday, I called to ask about the new spectacles. The lenses were there, but not the frames. There was some problem with the supplier.

Back to this morning: Someone from the place we get glasses called me. She wanted to know if I'd had a problem with the old glasses' seg point. I'd figured out that she must mean something about the way the glasses line up with my eyes when she explained that the 'seg point' was where the bifocals (trifocals, in my case) are.

Nope, seg point was fine. The things just didn't focus right any more.

She called, because the new lenses' seg point wasn't the same as my previous prescription. No idea why.

So, the lenses and the frames go back for another try. Why the frames have to go back, I have no idea. It'll be another 2 to 5 days before the new (and correct?) lenses arrive. I hope.

Apart from that, the day went well. I drove up to Little Falls, about an hour north and east of here, to pick up my wife's violin bow. That was a pleasant trip, and gave me some time to think.

My wife, #3 daughter, and our son went to Soo Bahk Do class tonight. Somehow, my wife managed to whack a board with her big toe, instead of the correct part of her foot. She assures me that it hurts.

"Garfield" reading with me marked the end of our son's day, as usual.

While in Little Falls, I saw someone's effort to brighten up a corner of the world: a welcome sight in January.