I was on my way to my regular Thursday after-class luncheon date with Mom and Cousin C when my cell rang. Message: I had to go home immediately and let the furnace guy into the house.

This is how cold my house has been these past two days: I’d been looking forward to this date for a week, but for Randy of Randy’s Heating and Cooling, I dropped Mom off at the K-Mart Chinese (it’s got a cool name but I don’t remember what it is) and drove home. An hour later, the furnace is humming away, and it sounds so wonderful, I don’t even care that it doesn’t know the words.

It’s actually humming to the tune of almost three hundred dollars, but it’s better than the price of a whole new furnace. The furnace guy had taken the motor and fan home with him and fixed them himself, because apparently, my furnace is a dinosaur and no longer exists.

How odd. My parents’ old house had a furnace that was made of cast iron, and was over fifty years old, and it still worked perfectly, and if it did have a problem, parts could be gotten at any hardware store for it. My furnace is 17 years old, and has broken down several times, although none as completely as this, and now it’s a dinosaur with no parts to be had for it.

Thank you, Randy’s Heating and Cooling, for coming within the hour of being called, and for taking the time and trouble to pretty much invent and carve the part for me at your home, and for coming in today and installing the home-made part, which, so far at least, is working beautifully.

Built-in, pre-planned, selective obsolescence sucks.

I really wanted to meet Mom and C at the K-Mart Chinese today. Don’t confuse this restaurant with the Shoney’s Chinese, or the WalMart Chinese. We used to have a Hardee’s Chinese, but it’s now a Merle Norman shop. (I refuse to go there because I loved the Hardee’s Chinese the best.) Sometimes, I meet a friend for lunch at the Big Lots Chinese. All of these restaurants have lovely Asian names but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you which was which. I have my own system, and while people tend to give me funny looks when we talk about Chinese restaurants in this town, they all know exactly which one I mean, whereas when they talk about meeting at the Asian Pearl, I might very well end up at Big Lots.

Also, Barney not only is NOT a dinosaur, he sucks, too. In real life, he’d be devouring those little children, not singing stupid songs to them and prancing around like the hippo ballerinas in “Fantasia.”

I used to forbid my middle school students to say “sucks” and now look at me. It’s become kind of like “screwed:” the connotative meaning has evolved and the shock value is gone.

Too bad. We need words with shock value in order to properly describe shocking things.