Monday, May 14, 2012

Down with the sickness

Well folks, yesterday turned out to be a beautiful day for gardening, but I came down with some sort of sickness that included having a very sore and swollen throat along with a fever. Awesome. 

While watching the sunshine dance around the leaves outside, all I could do is whine that I felt crummy and wanted to weed my garden and there was nothing I could do about either at the moment. 

This morning I still had a fever and I still feel achy now, although not nearly as bad as I did this morning. My sinuses are getting clogged and I just know that the next week is going to be slightly miserable. 

On top of getting sick - on Friday night our house almost blew up. 

One of the burners on our oven wasn't working properly and was leaking gas. After I made dinner the CO monitor went off. We thought that it might just need new batteries (forgetting that it was actually hardwired to our electric), so we changed the battery and it still went off - along with the little red blinky light that said "get to fresh air." So we packed the kitties and put them in the car (it was late in the evening so it was cool outside) with the windows cracked and had Auron on the leash. 

We called the fire department, who then called NYSEG (our utilities provider) and long story short, they cut the gas line to our stove and we either need to get the stove fixed or replaced. *grumble* 

Looking at the prices of stoves, we're not sure if we want to have someone come and fix our range or just buy a new one. The only folks around that are able to service our Kenmore stove is Sears, and they charge $75 just to come and look at it. I'd hate to spend that money and then have them tell us "Oh yeah, this is shot to hell, you might as well buy a new stove." 

On the other hand, to buy a stove comparable to what we have, we'll have to spend at least $500-$600. That's a lot of cash. So I'm left wondering what will be the "better deal," but I'm leaning toward having it repaired. 

Other than the inconvenience of being sick and not having a working stove, let me just say how incredibly thankful I am that we have a CO meter in our house. We actually have ours hard-wired into the electrical system with a battery backup so we won't ever have to worry about it not working. The NYSEG person said that meter saved our lives, if we didn't have a meter and went to bed, we would have likely died in our sleep. That's incredibly crazy to think about (especially since I lived in a lot of apartments where there weren't CO meters, or even smoke detectors for that matter) but I'm glad that the bank required them for the sale. 

Maybe this weekend I'll get around to fussing with the garden. The weather is supposed to be nice and I don't have any plans to go anywhere. I think it might be nice to dig in there and get some things accomplished. 

Oh, my rose of sharon is FINALLY starting to go to leaf and one of my irises is going to bloom soon. YAY!

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