It’s been so unusually warm this winter; I seldom wear a coat at all, and our furnace has kicked on very infrequently indeed.

It’s been so warm, my poor crocuses got confused and sprouted. My apple tree is budding. And I’m sure lots of our other trees are putting out spring-like growths, but to find out for sure would require that I get up off my extremely large bottom and walk across the yard, which is exercise in my book and you can forget it.

But this weekend, the forecast is COLD. So of course, our furnace died.

We’ve not had good luck getting a furnace guy to come out here. Appointments were made and broken, made and forgotten, made and disregarded, and not by us. We were here. They never showed. Two years in a row. Maybe the furnace just felt neglected.

So this morning, as Hub was leaving for school, he told me to call a furnace guy and tell him it was an emergency.

Honestly, I don’t know how Laura and Mary did it, getting up out of those warm covers into a freezing cold cabin on winter mornings. At least I didn’t have to lie there and wait for Pa to shovel a foot of snow off me. But it was really cold in my house this morning.

Part of the shivering was no doubt because I never wear shoes unless I absolutely have to. This morning, I wore socks AND shoes. In the house. This just never happens. AND, I wore a heavy sweater over my Rocky Horror t-shirt. It was cold. Oh, and jeans. (pervs.)

I called the furnace guy and someone actually answered the phone! I went into shock. After I got my voice back, I explained to a very patient lady what had happened, and she said she’d get back to me. I sighed. Their history of ‘getting back to me’ wasn’t very good. But this time, things were better. Maybe it was the sound of my teeth chattering as I spoke with her.

Around noon, the furnace guy arrived. Around one, he told me that the furnace needed a replacement part that was no longer made, as my furnace is apparently a dinosaur. He made several calls and finally located the part in a store thirty miles away. He left his tools in the entryway and left for the city.

Around three, he came back with the part. He took it down to the laundry room where my furnace rubs shoulders with my washer and dryer, and lo, it fit, and it worked. Around three-fifteen I wrote him a check for $128.60, which, considering his drive and all, wasn’t bad.

Around three-thirty, I could feel some warmth seeping back into the house. It felt wonderful. I popped “Two Weeks Notice” into my kitchen DVD player, made a sandwich, and sat down to enjoy. I watched about a half hour of it, and then decided it was time for some more blog-reading.

Around four thirty, as I was typing away at my computer, the power went off. I could hear the furnace dying; I could hear the dishwasher winding down, and I could hear the cat screaming at the patio door.

Having learned a valuable lesson last week, I tried to phone PSI and ask them about the outage. None of our phones worked. I tried my cell. It wouldn’t let me press in all the numbers the PSI recording required. In frustration, I punched the ‘0’ several times, and behold, a human being answered.

“We think it’s a squirrel,” she said in a professional voice.

Around five thirty, the power came back on. I could see digital clocks blinking all over the house.

It’s now almost ten o’clock, and so far all the machinery in the house seems to be working. It’s warm, Hub is home, we’ve had dinner (a gas stove that’s already turned on will stay on even when there’s no power, I discovered today) and he’s sitting over there completely obsessed with MarrowWind, and I’m sitting here completely obsessed with all of your blogs and counting my blessings that all of you are far more sensible and smart than I am, and that you are good, true friends.

The only weird thing is that I’m still wearing shoes.

Ordinary life is a lovely thing indeed. Except, of course, that there isn’t any such thing as ordinary life.