Catching Up

I didn’t mean to go quite so long in between posts, so this is a little bit of a catch-up post. 

Thank you for all of your kind comments about Frankie.  I love that people who never met him cared about him.  He was special, and we miss him a lot. 

I am so happy that we’ll be having more daylight now.  And very hopeful that warm weather won’t be far behind.  I’m not a fan of the cold weather or the shorter days, and it seems like January and February are rarely good. 

On January 9^th, we had torrential rain.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much rain at one time.  Our crawlspace flooded and shorted out the sump pump and furnace.  It took several days to get the crawlspace dried out enough for the HVAC company to even access the furnace. 

Here’s some video of the first day Nick set up a portable sump pump.  We bought a portable one to keep on hand for future storms, and since we didn’t know the status of the one installed under the house and there was more rain in the forecast. 

And here’s a video I took after the portable sump pump had been running for over 24 hours. 

It was a lot of water!

The HVAC company came out again when we thought we’d pumped out enough water to access the furnace, but after some more rain, they still couldn’t get to it.  They were able to access the sump pump and were nice enough to get it working again, which helped pump the water out sooner.  It’s the same company that the technician who remembered Duke after rigging up a temporary cooling system so Duke wouldn’t get too hot works for.  They are awesome. 

When the same technicians came back for the third time during the furnace underwater fiasco, we fixed up a bag of snacks for them since they had been so nice.  (It’s just one bag; just pictures of both sides.)   They seemed really surprised and happy with it.  I’m always happy when I can feed people.

The flooding had shorted out a circuit board in the furnace, and they had to order a replacement.  They were awesome about looking for ways to get it cheaper, and we ended up spending about half of what the highest cost would have been.  Like I said, they’re awesome.

By the time everything dried out and the part came in, it was January 19^th before the furnace was fixed, which was just in time for temperatures that dropped down to the single digits.  Being without heat for ten days definitely wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  Our neighbors loaned us a space heater, and we bought two additional space heaters.  The house was chilly but not unbearable.  We weren’t comfortable with the idea of both of us leaving the house with the space heaters on, and we didn’t want to turn them off and leave the cats at home to be cold.  So, we had to do some schedule rearranging.  I turned a few usual office days into work-from-home days, and took a day off on a day that I had to be in the office.  January is one of my busiest months at work, so I’m glad Nick was able to take the day to be at home. 

One of the things that goes on at work in January is an annual meeting that covers mandatory training and any policy updates.  They also present awards named our motto of RITE (Relevant.  Innovative.  Timely.  Engaging).  Anyone in our organization can nominate someone for each category.  I was pleasantly surprised to be a recipient of the Engaging Award for my work on some of our programs.  It was a nice confidence boost!  All of my coworkers have a lot more education and experience than I do, and most of my work is the behind-the-scenes type.  So, it meant a lot to me that they nominated me. 

Work has been really busy for both of us.  Nick does a fair amount of teaching this time of year (in addition to his usual job) for mandatory training that has to be done.  Due to a shortage of people, he has done even more lately.  We’re short-staffed at my job, too, and I got assigned to a project that will last most of the year, with most of my part being toward the beginning of the project.  It’s a mix of terrifying and exciting to be involved in.  I’m learning a lot, which is always a good thing. 

The middle of February brought what we’re pretty sure was the flu.  Nick started getting sick the third weekend of the month, and I thought I had dodged it up until the following Thursday.  We didn’t get tested for the flu, but our symptoms matched, and our COVID tests were negative.  I did a home test, and Nick had to take one when he went back to work.  That one was apparently also supposed to test for if you had recently had COVID and was negative.  So we’re calling it the flu.  We’re both back at work and feeling better; we're just still coughing some and really tired. 

Charlie is the world’s best cuddle buddy and was very happy with the amount of time I spent in the recliner under blankets. 

Despite everything that went on in January and February, we did have two fun days of outings to parks.   I’ll post about those soon.  In the meantime, here’s a peek at one of the trails at Fort Ninety-Six. 

How were January and February for you?  Are you happy about the longer days and warmer weather?