Thaw Inside

Now that the outside is just a slushy icky wet mess, the inside of the house got thawed out today.

My brother sent the HVAC man to fix the furnace.   Turned out to be a faulty thermostat and that cold air blowing from the vents was not my imagination.   The old thermostat was not actually telling the heat strips of auxilliary heat to come on, but the fan was blowing anyhow.

Outside the heat pump on the inside was clogged in dryer lint.  The dryer vents about a foot from the heat pump.  I'd leaned a window screen over where the dryer vents out of the house, but the tech said lint still gets sucked in from the sides of the heat pump.   There was so much icky soggy lint that the pile looked like a dead animal.   He said, unless we reroute the dryer vent, it will need cleaned every six months.

He had to take the top off the heat pump to clean it, because the fins slant downward so you can't even tell on the outside it has an inside problem.

The new thermostat is so much better than the last one and has an "auto" setting, which I love in the spring, when the weather is schizophrenic.

So all good here. 

As soon as he'd fixed it and was gone, I took off for the store.  First time out for a week.  It's really wet out, with water running down streets and starting to flood in spots and rain pouring.  I had nothing fresh left except one sweet potato, one banana and some wilting salad.  It would have been enough for another day before resorting to canned soup and fruit.  I do not like canned soup but I have it on hand for times such as this.   I think canned food has no flavor except salt.  And too much of that.   So I add spices and try to doctor it up to taste decent.  Tonight I will make another pot of lentil vegetable soup, for the next week.  I was going to get beets at Walmart, to roast for the soup but walmart wanted over $3 for two small beets. They wanted $4 or was it 5 for one undersized butternut squash.  The prices were crazy, in fact, worse than usual and I suppose that's because trucks haven't been able to get through to bring more goods in.  

I think of summer especially this winter.  It's been so wet and then this last cold spell.  I think of the big fat blackberries I pick from my kayak at the lake in August.  But I don't know if I'll be able to get them next summer due to the reservoir mess.  Free food, and plentiful and so delicious.  But the strawberries maybe, from the farm down Seven Mile I can still dream about realistically.  I can't stop thinking about berries for some reason last two days.  I even dreamed about them last night.

It's January.   By now, seems like the wet and gray never will end.   It can be a depressing month.   But now I am warm again in my own place so all seems right with the world.