Baby it's cold outside

We woke up today to a -10 F reading on the thermostat outside our kitchen window, and to a 51 F reading on our living room thermostat. We turn the heat down at night pretty low--to 56, in fact--but not that low. It seems that the radiators in the living room and study somehow stopped working during the night. The furnace, on the other hand, is working like its life depends on it, and so the rest of the house, particularly the bedrooms upstairs, is toasty.

We live in a rental, and the maintenance guy is married to one of my husband's colleagues, which in some ways is nice, but also can be awkward, like when he repeatedly promises to do things he never, in fact, does. One can only hound one's colleague's husband so much. Now the heating problem of this morning is not, as far as I know, related to anything our maintenance guy has put off doing. Indeed, he got the landlord to put in a brand new furnace last fall, and the old one hadn't even broken yet (though it did seem to be on its last legs). But it may be related to something else that drives me crazy, which is his insistence, in spite of the landlord's willingness to spend money for upkeep, to doing things on the cheap.

For the installation of that new furnace he hired a retired guy who apparently was quite inexpensive and who also, quite clearly to us at least, didn't really know what he was doing. It took him many trips to the hardware store, and two days beyond what he'd anticipated, to install the new furnace. Even though we've had nothing to complain about since then (until now), we've been somehow suspicious about this new furnace and sort of waiting for something to go wrong.

And one more thing. Neither the maintenance guy nor the heating guy seems to know how to install a programmable thermostat. We asked them to do so a year ago, and finally they did, but it doesn't really work. (It keeps resetting itself, and basically only works if we use the "hold" function and so we have to manually set the temperature whenever we want to change it.) We've been promised it would be replaced, but it never has been. I'm too embarrassed to continue complaining, and so we've adapted. Both guys, by the way, don't really understand what the big deal is about programmable thermostats. Didn't the old kind work just fine? (Energy conservation, anyone?)

So, I've now been waiting several hours for this same semi-competent but inexpensive retiree to come take a look at our current heating problem. And I'm in a tizzy, unable to focus on anything that I should be doing. (Which I suppose is why I'm blogging about it--at least I can get a blog post out of this tizzy!) I hate not being able to depend on our heating system in a place with such cold winters. I hate feeling as if I must always be polite and restrained with a maintenance person who doesn't really do his job. But most of all, I hate that I let all of this get to me so much!!