Two warnings

Damn, I'm tired of it being cold in my house. It's not literally freezing, no danger really of the pipes bursting or anything, but it's just hard to get going in the mornings when it's cold. In case you are wondering, my furnace is still not working. Yeah, since before Thanksgiving. Except for the compressor, I basically have a new furnace, I think. And I'm not holding out hope that thing won't go either.

The first part, by the time the guy got my check and it cleared, it was on backorder, so we had to wait. Then when that got in, the furnace was still doing its mini-exlosion thing, so the repair guy had to check with the manufacturer and found it was the control board in the unit. So that had to be ordered. Then when he got that in, while we were gone, he left a note that try it, should work, and when Mom turned it on, the whole house started vibrating. Seems some packing material was still in there and was blocking the blower. He came out the next day, got that fixed, but then the blower wouldn't come on. So he's got some kind of valve ordered and we're waiting for that to come in.

I don't know what's worse. Not having heat because the electricity went out, or not having heat because of this. Now, we at least have electricity for space heaters, and while it gets chilly in the mornings, at least it's not the 40-some degrees inside during last year's ice storm. But after the ice storm, it was only a couple days we were without heat. I just want my damn furnace working.

And yeah, I probably could have avoided this with having regular maintenence done before winter, but know what? That costs money. And my newspaper job paid me only enough to get by with the basics. At least until 2006. I sat down last summer and figured it out. My regular expenses -- and I don't have a lot of extras I pay for -- went up more than 20 percent from 2006 to 2007. My paycheck? Went up by not even 2 percent. Guess what. That don't add up. Hence, the second job. Now I'm having to play catch-up on all the things I should have been able to do.

So, two warnings: Have your furnace checked when the weather's warm, and don't go into journalism if you want to be able to afford to do things like that.