Monthly Archives: October 2009
Flashing Lights
I’ve developed a new philosophy… I only dread one day at a time.
~Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)
The fire department just left. And I still don’t feel much better. But let me back up.
This morning when I got up, I smelled something that smelled hot. Not smoke or anything, just… hot. I thought nothing of it and thought that my blankets had overlapped the furnace register and were smelling a bit warm. I removed those and went on with my morning routine of taking the dogs outside, showering, feeding the pups and then getting ready for work.
That’s when I went back into the hallway and smelled the “hot” again. Very faintly though. I went into the bedroom to get some clean socks and smelled it even stronger in there. I went back out into the hallway and into the kitchen on my way to the basement to get a sweater from the clean laundry pile. On my way there, I stopped immediately because it just hit me. I smelled something hot. Very strongly. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t good.
So I backed up and started sniffing all over the house. Nope, not in the kitchen. Not in the livingroom. Not in the guest bedroom. Not in the cat room/office. Slightly in the hallway. Not in the bathroom. Oooo… yup, just in the bedroom. Definitely smelling hot in the bedroom. Hot like when you leave your curling iron on too long and it has hair wrapped around it and it burns.
So I immediately unplugged everything, which was just the alarm clock and the box fan that Skah has blowing on him at night. I sniffed in the closet where the attic access is… nope, not in there. Ran my hand over the walls and the electrical outlets… not hot. So I headed down to the basement to sniff around there… including the furnace. Nope, nothing. I even opened up my windows and sniffed outside just in case it was coming from the neighbor’s house. Nope.
So with Huzzy on deployment, who do I call for advice? My mommy. She suggested calling an electrician. So I called my Realtor’s realty partner since her company has registered everything, including electricians. They put in my windows, sliding glass door and put in the floor in my kitchen. Had to leave a message. So I called my Realtor. Had to leave a message.
By now, I was starting to panic. I knew I couldn’t leave and just go to work. I’d never forgive myself if the house went up and the dogs and cats were inside. So I decided to call the non-emergency police department. That person said I needed to talk to dispatch.
Now, I don’t want to call the fire department or the police if it isn’t serious. But dispatch did and the fire department came out to check out the house. None of the three men could smell the hot (which, by this point, I could smell about four feet farther away from the bedroom… it was stronger). This bugged me because I knew I wasn’t just smelling things.
They brought in their infrared heat sensors and even a CO monitor. Nope, nothing. Even had me kick on the furnace to see if that was it. They asked me if I recently turned on my furnace for the first time in the season. Nope, it’s been on for about a month.
So they left. The only thing they possibly think it might be was the motor on the box fan that I have blowing on Skah at night. I still smell it. I feel better that there’s nothing hot in the walls and no CO. But I still smell it. And that bothers me.
Right now, I’m opening up the house to air it out in hopes that the smell goes away and just doesn’t come back. I think I’m going to come back at lunch just to make sure everything is okay. The thought of leaving my animals–who have no way to get out of the house–scares me. I don’t know what I would do if something happened to them like a fire. The guilt just might kill me.
But I’m sure everything will be fine. Nothing is “hot” in my house and the fire department had no problem leaving. So I’ll try and feel the same way.
Ugh… but I feel like bursting into tears from embarrassment (them NOT finding anything), happiness (them NOT finding anything) and fear (that they DID NOT find anything and I still smell it). I really want to talk to Huzzy about this because he can usually make me feel better. But he doesn’t need to worry about this when he’s about to be away from any sort of communication with me for several months. So I ‘ll just keep it to myself (yes, he does know about this blog, and I sent him a link a long time ago, but he ALWAYS forgets what the website is to find it!).
Friday Funny #10: Skah, the Scary Guard Dog
With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.
~Abraham Lincoln
It’s time for the next “Friday Funny.” As a Navy wife with a husband who isn’t home much (and is deployed right now) sometimes things can get a bit melancholy.
Please join me with the “Friday Funny” meme. It can be anything from a comment that made you laugh or a funny story or even a funny photo/video you have seen. Leave a comment if you post one and I’ll visit your blog to see!
This one is from my own home. Skah is our now 21 month old Great Pyrenees. We found out when he was 10 months old that he is completely deaf. We specifically chose this breed (well, Huzzy did) because he wanted a guard dog that he could feel comfortable leaving his family with whenever the Navy called him away (which is often, since he’s active duty).
While I was gone drilling (I’m a Navy reservist) the other week, he saw a big, scary garbage can while on a walk at my mom’s house and started barking a “low, mean, scary bark that meant business” (according to my mom). He really was trying to protect her. Which is awesome, because that means his guarding ability is starting.
But it’s not quite all the way there, as evidenced by the other night’s fun….
(please ignore the messy countertops, I’d just gone grocery shopping)
Thursday Thirteen #10: 13 Reasons I Hate Winter
Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.”
~Robert Byrne
It’s time for the Thursday Thirteen again. If you have a Thursday Thirteen of your own, leave your website in the comments section and I’ll try my darndest to visit it 
I can’t believe I’m still living in Michigan. I thought for sure that I’d be in Washington by fall. I am SO not wanting to deal with another Michigan winter. So, in honor of the fact that it actually SNOWED today (no accumulation, thank God), I thought I’d find a fitting “Thursday Thirteen.” So here it is:
13 Reasons I Hate Winter
- It takes 5 minutes just to put on all your outwear so you can walk the 2 seconds to your car to turn it on so that it can warm up 10 minutes. Driving on a super-cold engine isn’t good. Then you go back inside, take off your outerwear, do something for five minutes (’cause if you leave your outerwear on too long you get too hot… and then it doesn’t feel like you are wearing anything when you go back outside) and then start putting it all back on.
- It takes significantly longer to take the dogs outside. Greyhounds need jackets when humans need jackets. And Skah, the fuzzy wonder dog, looooooooves the snow (hey, his breed originated in the mountains!) and usually likes to take lots of time outside.
- It is dark when I get up. I hate this. It makes me feel like I didn’t get enough sleep.
- It is dark when I get home. I hate this, too. Makes me feel like it’s bedtime and I don’t get much accomplished.
- Shoveling snow. Back-breaking work. ‘Nuff said.
- It’s tough to stay active in winter when you can’t go outside for more than 5 minutes because the -20 degree weather (yes, negative 20) means you start getting frostbite within minutes.
- Snow starts flying in October. It can fly through April. Heck, May has been known to have a 6-inch snowstorm. That’s seven months of winter. It feels like it never ends.
- Heating a house to 64-65 degrees (my normal temperature since the Greyhounds get too cold at the 62 I used to set the thermostat for) in sub-zero temps means $200+ electric bills a month. My hands and feet are cold from October to May. In fact, my nails are generally a lovely purple color most of that time due to the iciness of them.
- You know how pale Edward is in the Twilight series? He looks like he has a tan compared to how I look mid-February. If I don’t wear foundation and blush, people will continually ask, “Oh my gosh… you look horrible… are you feeling okay?” Stupid translucent skin (though I am lucky that it tans nicely in the summer).
- Dirty snow. Everywhere. Snow that doesn’t melt for 3+ months at a time gets realllly dirty along driveways and roads. It’s not pretty. In fields, yes… but everywhere else, it’s pretty darn ugly a few days after it falls.
- Other drivers. Seriously… if it is snowing/icing/sleeting… slow the &*$@ down! I can drive just fine in the snow. However, I’m not a miracle worker who can magically avoid all the idiots on the road who think that since they have an SUV or snow tires that that somehow makes them magically be able to drive 60 mph on an ice-covered road.
- We have mostly deciduous trees around here. Which is absolutely gorgeous in the spring, summer and fall (which constitutes only 5 months of the year, COMBINED). Not so in the winter. The trees look dead with no leaves and combine that with the dirty snow and the fact that it gets dark at 5 p.m. and you have one very depressing landscape.
- People who say that they’d rather deal with a Michigan winter than a Florida summer. Let’s look at this from a numbers point of view. When I was in school, we considered “room temperature” to be 72 degrees. This is the temperature that the majority of humans are comfortable at. For the sake of ease, let’s call it 70 degrees. So a Florida summer generally is in the 90s and 100s. Let’s be nice and say that with the heat index, it can easily get to 120 degrees. That is a 50 degree deviation from the generally accepted “comfortable” temp. The same 50 degrees the other way is 20 degrees. We can easily reach a -20 in real temp with the windchill at -30 (two winters ago I remember us sitting at -18 for three days and we rejoiced when after two weeks, we finally went above zero). Negative 30 is a 100 degree variation from the “comfortable” temp. That is a variation equivalent of 170 degrees on the hot end! So we deal with a wider range of deviation from “normal.” Yup, I’d rather deal with a hot summer than a freakin’ cold winter. Now, I don’t like hot, humid summers at all (and Michigan has those too!) but I’d rather deal with that than the cold of winter.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Friday Funny! I have a hilarious video of the fuzzy pup Skah and how “brave” he was last night.
Another Giveaway!
Never do anything that you wouldn’t want to explain to the paramedics.
~Author Unknown
The Mrs. over at Trying our Best is having another giveaway. This time it’s an adorable corduroy bag.
Giveaway from the Mrs. at Trying Our Best
I told it it’s cute, right? You can get up to three entries. One by posting a comment on her blog, one by blogging about it yourself and one for sending a Tweet out on Twitter. I’m going for a triple play myself!
Good luck!
I Love Being Right
They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.
~Wilt Chamberlain
My husband needs to listen to me more. Actually, he really is learning that. In fact, a few months ago, he said something to the effect of, “I need to just listen to you more and realize you are probably right.”
Well, Mrs. Right strikes again!
You see, I have been reading many a MilSpouse blog and have been on many MilSpouse forums and submarine wife forums and have been researching things. I know that the general consensus among spouses is that you need a power of attorney during deployment. Generally it’s for those stupid things that come up or to be able to get things done in the military sector.
Well, Huzzy fought me on it. He didn’t like the idea of someone being able to “have all that power” over his life. I advocated and argued with him that it really was a good idea to have it just in case. The idea was driven home when over the summer his student loans just mysteriously stopped being automatically withdrawn. He didn’t realize it for a few months (they were being taken out of his personal account). So it hit home that things COULD happen while he was gone. But that didn’t help out a whole lot. Some, but not much.
He decided that he’d give me some limited powers of attorney… one to sell his Jeep, one to buy a house and one to get a MWR loan in the case of an emergency. He neglected to get one to sign a lease to rent a house, which is what we are most likely going to do.
So when I saw him unexpectedly last week (yes, that’s part of the “I’ll tell you later” stuff) I again brought up the general power of attorney. I reminded him that if something happens in his personal checking account or if something happens to his student loans or any other financial things that I’m not on that I’d have no way to take care of it.
So he grudgingly gave me one and it arrived in the mail today.
And just in time.
Today I went to the dentist to not only get my six month cleaning, but also to get my dental form filled out that will let me go do that opportunity in Rhode Island next month. After getting a full set of x-rays (not just bite wings), the receptionist came back to tell me that the insurance said I wasn’t covered.
Um… Huzzy took care of that back in March after we were married. Or so I thought.
Yeah, I’m not covered. But guess what! I can sign myself up… with a power of attorney. Yes, less than a week after Huzzy left, I needed that POA that he only reluctantly gave me.
Ha! I win! Or rather, we kinda lose money since I had to pay for the x-rays and new patient exam out of pocket. But they let me reschedule my cleaning until after November 1st when I’ll be covered by dental.
But still… I was right again! 
