BAD HOLIDAY

Some days feel like a bad holiday. My central heating and air went out this past week. Central heating and air is a scary venture. On your own. You could get shocked. A 120 volt to the finger might seem fun at first, but when you don't know which wire goes where (the deeper you get into the console), you get the sense you could accidentally be blasted into eternity. 

The things that go through my mind when I'm focused on thermostats, wires, and instructions. There was this bit about a "jumper" that connects RH and RC. However, if you don't have both coming out of your wall to correspond to the thermostat.... Oh, they didn't say. Which suggested to me that I could hazard a guess and probably explode all over the place. Or I could get it right and it still not work. I felt like I was playing this Reality TV show where I was both audience and participant.

While I was driving to the store, I was surprised that being hot and sweaty could make me want to go all Rambo on... anything. I remember thinking that Army infantry thousands of miles away were probably sleeping like babies in air-conditioned barracks. Those kinds of thoughts don't help get work done. Really.

So last night I thought I had done the best I could and figured I would just lie down to watch TV on my leather furniture upstairs only to realize that when I was awakened for bed, all the bare parts of my body stuck to the couch. And I was covered in a feverish sweat probably due to the fact that my girls had on Mel Gibson's Signs, the music of which caused me to sleep in fidget fashion.

Upon waking, I find out that two more children have chicken pox, and one of them is fever-hot!

When the one handyman you trust is out of town, it is painful to seek out another. I mean, I know nothing about central heating and air. But after taking the outside panel off the larger console, I would have charged, I don't know, $250 up front just to clean out all of the dust, grass, and little hornet mud huts. Then I would have charged an extra $250 just because it smelled dangerous.

The handyman I found did a great job, but he seemed perplexed at the very same things I was perplexed over. It ended up that I need a new circuit board which had burned so thoroughly in places that it was charred.

I don't want to die yet, so I guess I will bite the bullet and call a professional. I've sent out a couple of inquiries, but nothing yet. It's Friday night at the Grayson house which means pizza! Hopefully cold pizza.