Five for Friday

And just like that, it’s mid-April! Many apologies for being MIA lately, internet! I miss you! (And I fully intend to catch up on what you’re up to.) This is one of those pell-mell times of the year, where I feel like I’m being propelled down a steep hill and can barely get my feet under me. All (mostly?) good things, but this is the first Fun Writing I’ve done in… three weeks maybe? When I go to open a document in Word, NONE of my recent files are my blog document, is what that means. (Yes, I type all my posts in Word and then transfer [some of] them to WordPress.)

Seems like a good day for a quick catch-up. And then I need to find a solid week or so to go back and read ALL OF YOUR POSTS, omg, I feel so out of the loop. 

1. I am spending today as we all hope our Fridays go: waiting for the HVAC service technician to show up. Why, yes, that was sarcasm, and yes, our furnace IS dead. I’m glad it’s not, like, January, but it is currently 45 degrees F outside and the internal temperature of my house has dropped to 65. Perfect weather for walking on the treadmill while I cross two items on my to-do list off simultaneously! 

Our furnace is 23 years old, if it is a day, so it’s no spring chicken. But we did just have the HVAC people in here this February to give it a checkup, so I’m feeling a little grumpy that it’s acting up now. Back in February, I asked the HVAC guy to give me a prognosis on the lifespan on my furnace, and he said, “Well, I can’t guarantee anything – it could stop working tomorrow! But it seems like it’s in good shape and you could get another ten years out of it.” Not sure why I didn’t hear the foreboding music swell in the background of this little pronouncement.  

2. While I drank my breakfast (which was a smoothie and a mug of green tea, not, like, whiskey), I whacked away at my to-do list a bit more. It’s at that out-of-control point again, where things keep piling up until I am buried under their weight. The section I tackled today was Making Routine Doctors’ Appointments. Well, some of them were routine. Like I got Carla scheduled for her annual well visit and her annual eye exam (which we somehow skipped last year????). I also left a message on my doctor’s prescription line to follow up on a refill that I requested earlier this week. That last one took two calls because I got through three menu trees and clicked on “leave a message for Dr. X” and then had to listen to a recording that said this was the place to leave questions for the nurse, NOT the place to leave refill requests, so I had to go through all the phone menus again. And! Most exciting of all: I scheduled an ear piercing appointment for Carla! This will be her Big Birthday Present this year. She has been ramping up the requests to have her ears pierced over the past six to twelve months, and she has really made strides in Being Responsible (she has a necklace she wears daily that has so far always come home with her; she has a dental appliance she has to care for). Plus, she got a pair of nice-quality clip on earrings from her grandmother last fall, and she wears them regulary. So I think she is ready for pierced ears. I, however, am NOT ready for pierced ears. I have never had pierced ears, or any sort of piercing, and the whole thing a) squicks me out and b) makes me extremely nervous. I am squeamish and blood/body stuff makes me woozy. I am comforted by Carla’s swift and independent handling of her dental appliance; I have never had to touch it or adjust a single rubber band, and her orthodontist says she is doing great, so I am going to trust that between her and my husband, she’ll figure out how to care for HOLES in her BODY. 

Still on the list are many additional phone calls, which I will probably avoid some more. I need to call the landscaper, make an appointment to get my car serviced, call someone to come look at our oven, call the trash collection service about whether they will collect some unusual items (paint cans and gutter guards), hire a lifeguard for Carla’s birthday party, and get some estimates to get the exterior of our house painted. Also on my list: a work project, two rather major projects for my volunteering role, a message for a family member’s Big Birthday Memory Book, finding photos of Carla for a school project, making decisions about and then scheduling a couple of other healthcare-type things, and, most daunting of all: figuring out how to order breakfast for an out-of-town group event at which I will not be present, in a town I have never visited and know nothing about.

3. A phone call I already made this week? Scheduling an appointment with our new pest control service. Even though we live, like, twenty miles away from our old neighborhood, the locations are different enough that they seem to have totally different pest problems. At our old house, we had silverfish; at this house, we have ants, stinkbugs, mice, and bats. “Probably you had rats, too,” the pest control guy said helpfully. But since in twelve years I never once saw a rat, or any sign of such, I refuse to acknowledge this as a possibility.   

While he is from the same pest control company that handled our mouse problem when we first moved into this house, he is not the same person. He tells me he was injured last fall and on leave. But he used to do pest control for the previous owners, which was useful because he knew exactly where to go and what the problem areas were. He also kind of implied that the previous owners canceled a ton of their appointments, so he wasn’t surprised we had such a huge mouse infestation when we moved in. While I feel deeply uncomfortable with service people sharing qualms about their other customers, I do feel a little bit justified in my growing belief that the previous owners did not really take care of this place. Lots and lots of things have looked lovely on the surface and then turn out to be falling apart behind the scenes, and the repeated cancellation of regular home maintenance stuff helps explain that. Don’t get me wrong – they seem like lovely people, and I get the impression they are just very busy and travel a lot. And who knows! Maybe they had other stuff they were dealing with, and/or once they decided to move, they simply stopped keeping things up. I will tell you, while I am NOT EXCITED about bats or mice, I do prefer the tiny little ants and the occasional stinkbug to silverfish. 

4. Did you know you can make queso dip out of cottage cheese? Possibly you already knew this, but I only just tried it. It was marvelous. I don’t know how “healthy” it was, especially because I ate it with tortilla chips. But it was easy and much higher in protein than covering my chips in shredded cheese while being just as delicious.

5. Speaking of things I have recently tried and loved, I have FINALLY found a travel pillow that allows me to sleep on the airplane! Sleeping is really the only way I can fly, because I find the entire experience so anxiety-producing. But I am not a person who can lean back against the questionably clean headrest or use a travel pillow. My head insists on flopping forward, no matter what, and each time it falls, I snap awake. It is neither comfortable nor restful and it’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest. I have tried so many travel pillows. So many. None of them work. But then! My husband ordered a TRTL travel pillow to use on our flights to and from spring break (four-ish hours each way) and on our first flight, he let me use it… and it WORKS. My head can rest gently in a forward position but there is enough support to prevent flopping AND it doesn’t make my neck ache! I did feel like a moron, winding it around my neck like I was bracing for arctic winds, but it was well worth it! I used it on the flight home, too, and it is now mine, all mine. 

Okay, in the time since I drafted this post, I got a phone call (friend with whom I exchanged phone numbers for my phenomenal roof/siding person; being an adult is weird), made a phone call (oven repair person is scheduled!), wrapped two birthday presents, unloaded the dishwasher, tidied the kitchen, welcomed the furnace repair person into my home, threw some ice cubes into the dryer to refresh the clothes I dried last night and forgot about, discovered that my front door will BLOW OPEN unless it is locked, tossed a load of laundry in the washing machine, and agreed to pay to have a new transformer installed in my furnace. I think I hear the heater doing its thing! 

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Pestilence & Power Hour

Happy Leap Day, Internet! I am spending this extra day trying to decide whether the benefits of cold medicine (reduced headache, mild cough suppression, drying of the sinuses) outweigh the ill effects (drowsiness, zombie brain).

We had a good run of it, Internet. And by “it” I mean good health. Carla’s class has apparently been stricken by a boatload of illnesses and, after volunteering at a school event last week, I have brought one home. 

It started Sunday with a sore throat, then moved along through the normal URI progression, so I thought I was getting better. But today I woke up with no voice and a fever of 101.5. I feel like someone is trying to escape the inside of my skull by hacking at it with a pickaxe and he’s standing right on my lungs while he hammers away.

Carla was fine at first, but woke up with a fever yesterday, so she is home with me for the second day. So far it doesn’t seem to have hit her quite as hard. She’s feverish but cheerful. And sniffly. I hope her illness goes in the proper direction, though. 

I am bummed because I had weekend plans, but even if I do feel better by then, I am sure to be hacking up a lung which doesn’t sound pleasant for me or those around me. 

This post is not about me whining about being sick though. It is a celebration of productivity!

I know you are dying to know whether the internet magic of mentioning something on my blog made it happen, and it did! Via the power of public humiliation (although you made me feel understood rather than humiliated), I have made some progress on my to-do list.

While my preference would have been for Suz to come over and tackle my to-do list for me (you DID offer, Suz), I decided to take Jenny’s advice and do a Power Hour.

In my house, a Power Hour is a way to gamify a to-do list. I have heretofore only used it on my daughter, and pretty much only as a cleaning challenge. Although, to be fair, she will not do a Power Hour unless I am also doing a Power Hour – she is a competitive being – so I end up doing one alongside her. We haven’t done one in a while. But I have never really made myself do a Power Hour. 

Monday, I came home from school drop-off and took a nap until 11:00, then allowed my guilt for napping to propel me into a Power Hour. I will tell you, first, that the Power Hour is a misnomer because it took THREE HOURS.

1. First, I made a list on my new custom notepads that my husband and daughter got me for my birthday. 

2. Instead of calling the landscaper, I instead looked up an email she’d sent me in August with a recommendation for a tree trimming/removal company. I had called them, around that time; there’d been a storm that wreaked havoc on a lot of local trees, so the tree service said they would call me back and then never did. 

I called the tree company and someone is coming out to look at the tree in question and offer an estimate. Should I call someone else to come give a second estimate? Probably. 

3. Gigi said I needed to handle the rot in my siding sooner rather than later, so that was next on my list. She’d suggested calling a general contractor, so I spent some time looking at previous texts with friends whom I’d asked for contractor suggestions. None of them seemed right, and one of them mysteriously has NO Internet presence at all. Like… his name doesn’t exist on the internet. And it’s an odd name with an unusual spelling – something like Grygg – and I know the spelling I used was accurate because the friend who’d recommended him said, “Oh, I spelled his name wrong in the contact I shared; it’s Grygg instead of Gryyg.” Nonetheless, neither spelling came up with ANY hits online. 

So I turned instead to people who deal with gutters. This is what Marg had to do, at an approximate cost of $1500 for a similar issue. (THANK YOU, Marg, for the benchmark pricing!) We had our gutters cleaned regularly at our old house, and it was fairly reasonable price-wise, but the REAL price was in future phone and text spam from the company. So I didn’t want to call them. Moving has been a nice excuse to part ways with some companies I felt bad about parting ways with. I looked up some highly rated gutter service companies in our area and then called. 

The person who answered at the first place was so kind. I said that I had no idea whether she could help me, and she said, “Well, let’s just see!” and I explained my problem, and it WAS something she seemed familiar with. She even gave me an estimate for replacing that rotted wood right off the top of her head ($475 in case you are wondering). But then she told me that sometimes getting all of your gutters cleaned can help address the problem, and that adjusting the gutter would be part of the cost of that ($495 in case you are wondering). I don’t think replacing the rotted wood would necessarily have been part of the gutter cleaning cost, but then again, I’d be getting ALL the gutters cleaned, which needs to be done anyway. She was so warm and knowledgeable that I wanted to book her right then and there, but… well, I have been swayed by warm and knowledgeable people before (I’m looking at you, Guy Who Said I Needed to Replace My Garage Doors When Really They Only Needed a Small Much-Less-Costly Adjustment), so I told her I would talk it over with my husband and call her back. 

Gutter person number two was also very nice. He immediately asked if I could text him pictures of the issue and I did. But then he wanted to continue the conversation via text, which was a little less satisfying than being on the phone? I think, mainly, because a) we were discussing terms I wasn’t familiar with and b) the guy is not quite so wordy as I am (shocker) nor as wordy as I would prefer he be in responses. He said he thinks the issue is that “it” (the gutter?) just needs to be “pitched toward the downspout,” all of which are words I think I understand, but am not 100% sure I know exactly what that means? He can also replace the rotted wood and he is coming out to look more closely and give me an estimate. 

4. On to the pool service task! I had one recommendation from a friend, one company my husband had suggested, and another company the previous owners’ pool guy had suggested (note: we used the previous owners’ pool guy last year and he does not provide the cleaning/maintenance we are looking for, plus he is impossible to deal with – like, he will just show up unannounced in the backyard). I called and left messages at each company. I believe I have left messages with each of these companies before; only the friend-recommended guy ever called me back, and then said his brother would be in touch, and then the brother never got in touch. WHY IS THIS IMPOSSIBLE? 

5. There is a drip in our furnace. Plus, I got a text that said this was my LAST CHANCE to schedule the free furnace maintenance that comes with my membership to the HVAC company. I was confused, because I am SURE that we had someone come out last fall to look at the furnace; I remember very clearly because he told me that I was still eligible to get the extended warranty on the furnace, and then I called the warranty company and they needed my title within 90 days of the home sale, and the title hadn’t arrived, and I went back and forth with the title company and eventually we got the title but it was after the 90 days. So. No extended warranty on the furnace.

But I looked in my calendar, and it said the same company did an air conditioner inspection last September, so perhaps that’s what I was thinking of? So I called the HVAC company (my god this is a VERY BORING POST but somehow I cannot curb my desire to write out all the tiresome details) and the cheery gal I spoke to said yes, it had been an A/C checkup. So we scheduled a furnace inspection. Whew. 

6. Next! I first updated our family calendar with all the important dates from my daughter’s 2024-25 school calendar. Good lord, there are a lot of days off. Like, so many days off. Then I called the dentist and scheduled her next checkup. This, if you are keeping track, is the only actual task I have completed. 

7. Then I turned to the electrician, which has a very convoluted backstory. The TL;DR version is that I successfully scheduled an appointment for the electrician to come out and address multiple issues. The slightly longer version is that the company that we use has a very complex system that probably makes a lot of sense to them but is difficult to deal with. One person comes out to see what’s wrong, another person prepares an estimate for you and works with you to figure out exactly what work you want to do, then a whole other person schedules the appointment with you. On the day of the Power Hour, it took me multiple phone calls and multiple emails across multiple hours to finalize the work order and schedule a day for someone to come out. 

8. I wrote a check to the orthodontist and put it in my car. I still need to take the check to the orthodontist’s office, but that can be done at a later time.

9. I followed up on a work email (and have still not heard back siiiighhhhhh).

10. Bonus task! I talked to Carla’s teacher on the phone and then made a follow-up phone call based on our conversation.

These were the tasks I got through before it was time to pick up Carla from school. (Although I did exchange three separate phone calls, two texts, and an email with the electrician and the estimate person while in the car, so that was fun.) (The email and texts I handled while in the car line, not while driving.)

All in all, it was a productive Power Hour. But do you see, Internet? DO YOU SEE WHY I HATE THESE TASKS? 

I would like to note once again for the record that I spent THREE HOURS Power Houring my way through all these phone calls and emails and to-do lists and I accomplished one thing. Yes, yes, I got a lot of other things underway. But NOTHING ELSE is complete.         

And there are still so many, many items at which to pick away.  

One of those tasks is to call the hair salon and schedule an appointment for my husband. Since I have no voice, Carla is going to get to learn how to schedule an appointment today. Which is clearly a crucial skill every human must master. 

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