Didn't Expect That

It is eight below outside currently and it’s looking even worse for the next week here in Wisconsin.  With it being that chilly, what could possibly go wrong?

I’ll tell you!  Your furnace dies!  And you are the owner of your fine townhouse, so there isn’t a landlord to take care of this issue.  You are responsible for it. You are responsible for locating someone that will drop everything to come save you.  Thankfully, when people are in this same scenario, professionals get it. They can’t leave people without heat! Especially when the forecast isn’t looking good.  Ten, Fifteen, Twenty degrees below zero!! That is what it is looking like!

So Thursday comes along, it’s 7:45 PM and my furnace DIES!  It was four below at that point and it was supposed to be dropping to eight, which it did.  But the man that saved me couldn’t come until Friday morning. Thankfully he was able to locate a furnace quickly!  I wasn’t sure what the night would look like, because you always hear horror stories about pipes freezing and huge issues with water.  I wasn’t even that concerned about being cold because I have plenty of blankets and clothes. Layers! I was more concerned about other issues, like water.  I made sure I was checking temperatures during the night and turning on the water, just in case there could be an issue somewhere. I didn’t want an issue! So I made sure I was aware of what was going on.  What people don’t tell you is that it takes a long time for a house to cool down, but I was losing a degree every half hour until I reached fifty-five degrees. I believe what saved me was that I have two condos on each side of me, and they have heat!  In my basement, the temperature was fifty degrees until the furnace man came and then it was at forty-five degrees. So, I wasn’t that far from freezing, but thankfully, that didn’t happen.

My furnace man had been to my place earlier in the day and we realized there was an issue with the blower motor in the furnace, but he didn’t expect it to burn out.  He thought it would last till Monday morning, when we planned to replace the furnace.

The lesson I learned was that you just never know when things will happen, not that I didn’t already know that, but this was something I needed to be reminded of.  Here is the other important piece of the story. Had this been any other time in my life, I would have reacted, meaning I would have been stressed, overwhelmed, angry and sad.  I would probably have let my emotions get the best of me. When this all happened Thursday, I was laughing about it. I was not worried about it! I was not stressing! I was optimistic.  I was smiling, because I knew it wasn’t that big of a deal and that it would all work out. And honestly, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. It was fixed! And there wasn’t much to it!