The End of the Day
September 07, 2011
I got around to remembering to call the furnace company at 10:45. We can come between 11 and 4 today or on Friday. You don't have a service contract. This wouldn't be covered anyway. Act of God. Natural Disaster. Call Your insurance company. Okayfine, I'm on my way. Sigh. Furnace is as old as the house. It's a boiler, the house was built in 1962 or somewhere thereabouts, every year they tell me to replace it but it runs and also I know perfectly well it's THEIR JOB, the OIL company to sell ME a new furnace while I'm standing there looking them dead in the eye asking where on God's good earth they THINK I'm going to come up with $6,000 and I don't see how the damn thing can be called inefficient (particularly) given that my oil bills seem to run less than the average for the same size house (I checked) (and I don't keep it all THAT cold or burn all THAT much wood and Lucia takes stupid long showers if I don't BEAT HER SEVERLY ABOUT THE HEAD, NECK AND SHOULDERS) and even if the maintenance contract is $280 per year (or something like that) it (the furnace) has never really required much in the way of its annual cleaning and so I do carry on...
I was having a cow or baby cows on the way home anyway but there I went, set up my workstation and got back to work. Furnace guy arrived at precisely 2:45 and was complete at precisely 4 PM and charged me precisely $99 for 1 hour of labor, $122.12 for the part (I'll get to that) and $14.04 in sales tax which came to a grand total of $235.16. He then proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes explaining what he'd done and why and never ONCE told me to get a new furnace. Said, the thing started up and ran like a beauty so I figured it wasn't the burner. Look, he said, somebody did you a favor by replacing the burner at some point in time and I've got to tell you that thing hasn't changed since it was made however many years ago (a lot) but for some reason they didn't replace the now VERY OBSOLETE stack control which I just happen to have in my truck and if I had to go GET that part, the original, who knows how long it would take to order, if I could even find it, so now you have a new stack control and here's your new restart and by the way, the old safety on this was ninety seconds, just enough time to blow you and the house sky high. You got 30 seconds now before the light goes on and it shuts down. Much better. Sign here.
I wrote him a check. He wasn't told to collect. They'd bill. I'd just finished paying the oil company off (catching up on the budget payments) and there was no way in HELL I was going to be Not On Top with these guys. He took the check and marked it paid and was on his way.
I have hot water.
Meanwhile Little Girl is home with the anticipated forms and we're reading them together and signing the bottom lines together all to be returned today. School pictures are today so that was done first. Another bunch of photographs that will sit in an envelope forever more but she'll look damn good in the year book because she was up at 6 and I blow dried her hair.
The forms we signed. Agreements to do x,y and z. Or else. I signed. No problem. I always sign. Usually I don't even read. This year Little Girl said I had to read and we were going to read it out loud. Always these things are written in weasel speak (legalese) so it makes very little sense and I deconstructed each sentence and then taught her how so she'd understand what each teacher was getting at. It all came down to this:
- expected behavior
- expected results
- expected homework
- percentage of grades
- blah blah blah
You know what it means, I know what it means, sure you want to sign it (rhetorical)? And sign it we did.
With the full knowledge that I don't actually believe in homework for the sake of homework. I've been through this before on this blog so I'm not going to get into it again this morning. I signed because I'm not here to make a stand.
Somebody wrote on my Facebook status yesterday that maybe I should suggest spankings all around with appropriate enthusiasm if I didn't live up to my part of the bargain...
AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW I WAS OH SO TEMPTED TO TAKE OUT THOSE FORMS BEFORE SHE LEFT THIS MORNING AND ADD THAT AMENDMENT... ah, but the consequences would be paid by Little Girl. Still. Heh.
Another said it was too bad Little Girl wasn't around to be tutored in French with his exclusive Peter Seller's School of French:
"Ah-lo, zee minky ate-ah my home work. Zen when I did it for a second time, eet fell into zee puuueel."
Seven years of French and Numbah One Son can say perfectly this:
"All the squirrels in all the worlds" (it's the only communication that appealed to him)
Google Translate gives me this and it does sound about like I remember:
Thank you, she whispered on the way out of the mall. She is aware that I've been raw since the beginning of the conversation. She knows how I feel. I know it's unfair to ask her to fight my battles. It's a fine line. We've been through all this.
Small things.
Later yesterday I was looking at those seven pictures and I saw something I don't know that anyone else saw. Between second and third grade there is a difference in her posture and face. That year was hard because things were starting to blow up. Forth grade was the hardest for me to look at because that photograph was taken 8 months after her abandoment, not just mine. She is wounded and confused. I'm reading a lot into this. Fifth grade there is a great deal of defiance and she's grown up quite a bit. Sixth grade, a different soft of self awareness.
So raw.
I have hot water this morning.
Small things.