literally. we turned the heat on again on saturday evening after a respite due to the previous week's glorious "indian summer" weather. i noticed around 11 pm that my fingers were numb as they hit my keyboard, so i checked the thermostat and finally figured out that there was no heat flowing through the house. contrary to the gas company's advertising, their answering machine informed me there was no nobody home at their "24-hour" number and i should call them back during regular business hours. (addendum: you can read the middle of the story if you want, but the end of it is that several days and pilot re-lightings later we discovered our furnace is shot and needs to be replaced. will the money grubbing problems never cease?! not to mention we'll be without heat for another week until it's installed)
the voice told me i should also be aware that they would be most easily reached on TUESDAY, not monday. argh! a befuddled me thought they must have disconnected our gas. i admit that my last payment was late, but i couldn't figure out why they would turn me off without some advance notice. so we suffered through the chilly night and tried to be sparing with our hot water in the morning before church. i was sure it wasn't a blown-out pilot light in the furnace since i couldn't hear the hot water heater firing up at all. i was sure that washington gas must have pulled the plug on us mistakenly. the girls camped out with billy and me in our room and we all hunkered down for another cold night (dipped down to 20 degrees! brrrr!) and this morning i called the gas company to straighten things out. "no, there's nothing here to indicate that we disconnected your service", said the csr on the other end of the phone line. long story short, bill took a look at the furnace, discovered the pilot light out, carefully re-lit it, and wished he'd listened to his own better judgment (instead of mine LOL) and checked the pilot in the first place. ah, well... it was a good mini-course in compassion for all of us... i imagine there are many families around us who will suffer more than just a couple cold nights through the winter ahead... we got just a taste of that and i hope it serves us well in the days ahead.
Oh kate, I really feel for you. We went through this starting late spring, when we still needed a furnace. We piled on the clothes and made it through to warm weather. They said they would be back in August. I won't give you all the details; it would take far too long. It was well into October and instead of a rebuilt furnace, we now have a new $3500 furnace. It keeps the house warm, and I praise God for that, but it makes so much noise; I can hear it up stairs. I hope you've gotten yours in in a timely manner.
Love, Mom