It's been a bad month for posting. Between finishing up the house for winter, adapting to dog parenthood, and planning a hectic wedding, I've hardly had time to recall the fact that a blog exists in our lives. At our engagement party this weekend, however, people kept saying "Ooh, I can't wait to see this picture on the blog!" Oops. Better get on it, Jeannotte. Luckily, things are calming down to the point that we have no plans this weekend. That's such a delicious statement that I think I'll say it again. We have. No plans. This weekend. Awesome.
But I digress. We've been having a lot of fun. Chris has been doing an awesome job teaching Penny how to play. Her old life didn't involve a lot of playing (it was similiar to Michelle Duggar's, except that Penny got to go outside of the basement once a day), so Chris has taken on the task of teaching her to be easy and appropriate with her playing. She's doing really great, and will even suprise us with a "sit" once in a while. We are so completely in love with this dog.
A big thing tonight is that Chris and I finally figured out how to set our thermostat. I had been mentioning over the last couple of days that the temp in the house was dipping dangerously during the day. Normally, that ain't no thang for us. Those of you familiar with our Woburn apartment recall the year we spent heating the house with the oven. Chris is adamant, however, that the dog be comfortable, and her shivering last night was enough for him.
Our heating system has been a long time coming in itself. The house came with an oil tank from the 1940's that looked leaky at best, completely corroded at worst. In our optimistic mindsets, we decided that oil was not in our future - everyone kept telling us how easy the gas company made it to convert from oil to gas. We got some quotes to convert and were shocked. $8000 was the cheapest quote we got to do the conversion, even with help from the gas man. We decided to just look into oil heating, and found that our furnace was brand new and an oil tank was relatively cheap to replace. The oil man came and quoted us $2000 to fix up the whole system, and he had himself a deal. He also told me that our nasty, cast iron heating vents were worth money on eBay. I'm still not sure about that, as they are pretty nasty, but I guess it's good to have an emergency plan. At least they all work!
Anyway, the funniest part of all of this is that I found it strange that the oil man did not measure during all of this consultation. Whatever. Chris told me not to call and ask, to trust that the guy knew how to do his own job. Well, when they came to install the new (top of the line, energy efficient, etc etc) tank, guess what - it didn't fit in our basement. This was when I was home over the summer and you had better believe that I wasn't paying extra for a different style tank, nor was I accepting an old cast iron one even for half the price. What ended up happening was that a $4000 European tank was installed in our basement. I paid the original quote. And I'm sure the guy measures every basement now.
Between our history with heating (cold noses at 3am? space heaters?) and the snafu with the oil tank, it was so nice to program the thermostat and finally feel warm and comfortable for once. Bring it on, winter!
In other news...even though our engagement party was designated as being a No Gift Zone, some people insisted on being generous anyway. Lori and Marty got us this diesel tablecloth. She had no idea that I had already picked something like this out for the registry and I just love the way it looks on our table. Thanks, you guys!
Oh and...I decorated for fall. Enjoy. :)
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