Congrats, Theo!

I voted absentee about a week ago. Spent this morning arguing online with an intelligent but callow guy about why his vote matters. Put me in a bad mood, that did.

I'm lucky that my dad is an attorney and often up-to-date on the judge matters. Otherwise I rely on information in candidate statements or I leave it blank.

Typo Boy, I'm sorry to hear about the homeowner headaches. Bad timing sucks.

I wonder about two portable space heaters. One for upstairs, one for down, move around as needed.

Typo, FWIW, the new high efficiency furnaces make the Baby Jesus laugh.

My 1900-era furnace is getting replaced next week. It was retrofit in the 20s for natural gas, and probably clad in asbestos plaster around then. We should go from 15% efficient to nearly 90%. It won't pay for itself in a year, but we'll see some dramatic lowering of the winter heating bills, for sure.

Typo, we've got three space heaters right now. It barely gets above 55F with them going full blast if the temp outside is in the 40s.

This style of space heater works pretty well. It's cheaper than a new central heater, but it's not energy-efficient or cheap in the long run.

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It's gross and rainy outside and I am wishing now that I'd gone and voted early because it will not be fun later if it's still raining.

In a lot of pain so I got out my speech recognition headset. I must hate using speech recognition even more than I thought because I've been sitting with this headset on my head for 2 hours all the while using my gimpy hands to type. *facepalm*

Beverly, CHM is actually an older mom--mid forties and her snowflake daughter is her only child. There will be no distractions from her parenting style.

I think it bothers her that her daughter worships Liv and does whatever Liv tells her to do. Which suits Liv just fine but probably isn't best for Snowflake.

Plumbing is fine at our place...but I get to deal with an electrician tomorrow.

I think hope pray we are good on the plumbing front but I know eventually the electric will have to be replaced. God knows how old it is. Scary to think about but no way we can replace it right now.

Happy days. Our 19 year old furnace just died. 1,042 dollars to repair, and they warned of under parts in bad shape. So instead of repair, I guess fucking new furnace which is an expense we don't need right now.

Replacing a furnace sucks. We have to do it, too. There is the small consolation that if you do it before the end of the year, you qualify for a tax credit (our tax credit is around $1,200 for a $5,500 furnace/central air, for a 900-square-foot house). And your local power provider might give you a rebate, too (ours does, around $200).

We should go from 15% efficient to nearly 90%. It won't pay for itself in a year, but we'll see some dramatic lowering of the winter heating bills, for sure.

And then there's this. Our furnace is 20 years old, and probably 50-60% efficient. The new one should be at least 90% efficient, which is not as big of a jump as Theo's, but we're still looking forward to lower bills in the winter.

Still, it's a big damn expense and I'm not thrilled about it.