Well, I'm sitting at home this morning. It's a "testing day" on campus, where the unwilling students are herded into rooms to basically retake the SAT or the ACT so that the campus can either trumpet that "we're teachin' 'em!" (if the average scores go up) or increase the beatings for the faculty try to suggest ways to improve (if the average scores go down compared to the admission-time scores).

I don't know of any other campus that does this.

But - it means a morning off, for the faculty (and most of the students; only a small subset are actually tested).

Which, realistically means, I can get my furnace/ac drama taken care of finally. Or so I hope. This is part x of n, and I dearly hope that in this case x=n.

You see, I live in an old house. It used to be un-air-conditioned and it had what is quaintly known as a "floor furnace" - basically a big grille on the floor that burns oil (I guess) and generates heat. (The floor furnace would have been RIGHT outside what is now my bedroom door. It would have been unpleasant to get up in the night and maybe step on that hot grille with bare feet).

All this was replaced long before I bought the place. But as is often the case, things were more or less jury-rigged. There was no filter on my furnace set up.

(And this is how I am wilfully dense sometimes: when the repair guy came out this summer because the a/c wasn't working right, he asked me where my furnace filter was. And I was all "Uh?....Buh?" Because I had pretty much convinced myself that this was some kind of Magick Furnace and Air Conditioner that didn't need filters.)

Well, the decision was made that a filter was needed. So a grille was ordered to holdthe filter. It took a long time for it to come, and when it finally came in, it was during the Four Weeks of Death that we had late this summer, where it was like 117* ever day and air conditioners were dying all over town. So I had, I think, three appointments that they had to cancel because of emergencies.

Finally, two weeks ago Thursday, I got another appointment. Came home at 1 pm as they told me to (no afternoon classes). And waited. And waited. And throught about the errands I really needed to run. And thought about how unprofessional it looked to constantly be leaving campus early under the guise of having to meet the repairment who never came. And I started to get angry around 3 pm.

Finally, at quarter to five, the owner of the place showed up (Apparently they have big problems finding reliable employees - which kind of trickles down and hurts everyone). He took off the old cold-air return and discovered one patch of jury-rigging. The system has what's referred to as a "plenum" (I wonder how it came to be called that..."plenum" has something to do with fullness, no?) and the grille could not be installed. Instead, they'd need to approach it from the attic.

My attic access is in my junk closet.

So, I made an appointment for today (a MORNING appointment, the first one of the day, so hopefully they will be on time). And yesterday afternoon I hauled everything out of the junk closet (and found some things I could get rid of, so at least it was worth it from that standpoint). I also cleaned my house because you see, if they're still working at noon or so, I'm going to have to call one of my neighbors over to housesit so I can go teach my 1:00 lab, for which I need to pick up a van from Motor Pool, as it's a field lab...Sometimes things get a bit too complicated.

I cleaned my house because I cannot BEAR to have people in and think they might need to use the restroom and find my long shed hairs on the floor, or step into the kitchen to get a drink of water and find that my white ceramic tile* on the floor is all smudgy...that kind of thing. (part of my Fillyjonk nature, she says, shrugging.)

So at least I get a clean house out of the deal, and if I want to be superstitious, I will say that having cleaned house now will mean that the workmen will be done jolly fast, and I won't have to call my neighbor, and I'll even have time to go over to campus and appropriately prep for lab...

(*White ceramic tile, as a kitchen flooring...it's the tool of the Devil. You cannot keep it clean. It smudges, it shows every speck of dirt and every crumb, and God forgive you if you spill something sticky (as I apparently did some day earlier this week) and it spreads onto the grouting. Oh, and if you drop heavy things it can chip or crack. My next floor in there, I think, will be linoleum with a pattern of tan and deep-red dots, as it seems that tea and tomato-based things are the things I'm most likely to spill on the floor. Camouflage, you know.)


Edited to add:

n=x in this case. Yay.


They were ALMOST on time. They assessed the situation and, as it turned out, with a bit of cutting (and a bit of me needing to add some trim to cover where the new grille was shorter than the original hole), they were able to use a standard-sized grille, rather than going up and monkeying with the "box" and having to do lots of complex (and timeconsuming) rebuilding.

And even better, the filter's a standard size, so I will be able to easily purchase them to replace them each month.

AND the guys totally cleaned up after themselves - swept and carried out all the trash generated in the process. They also took the old grille away because they said they regularly did "scrap runs" for recycling those kind of things (Yeah - I could have taken it myself and gotten cash for it, but meh. It probably wouldn't be worth the time and gas. And the grille wasn't copper or some other high-value metal. Probably a nasty alloy of some kind.)

I guess it's a mark of adulthood when I'm happy about this kind of grille:



rather than this kind (actually, that kind kind of baffle me...and scare me a little, because they make me think of the James Bond villain with the metal teeth...)