Last weekend, while Overboard was still on her business trip to London and Grandma Jackie was in town to bail (er, help) me out with Kenny, it got cold around here. Real cold. Freakin' bitter, minus 30 with the wind chill kind of cold. And because of said cold, the house got cold too. Oddly cold.
We woke up Sunday morning and the temperature in the living room (and all across the main level) was noticeably cooler. I took a peek at the thermostat and, although it was set at 68, it read 52. This couldn't be good.
Luckily, the one room in the house that seemed unaffected by the temperature drop was Kenny's room. So, as Grandma and I tried to figure out what was going on and what we could do about it, the boy slept warmly in his crib.
However, after he had woken up and had his morning bottle, I decided to bring him down to the basement to play. In order to do so, I added on a layer or two for warmth. Consequently, my son played happily while dressed like this:
At the same time as the temperature drop, Comcast decide to have issues of their own with the digital cable signals, thus scrambling most of my channels, including the HD ones (plus making my Internet connection sporadic at best). Considering this was 1) During a cold snap where it was best to stay indoors and watch television, and 2) the day before the freakin' Super Bowl with the Bears actually playing in it, I was not very happy.
While on the phone with my neighbor, who was dealing with the same cable issues, I mentioned the plunging temperatures in my living room. He asked me if I had checked the furnace, and more specifically, the furnace filter.
"The furnace filter? Hmmm...I don't recall checking that...ever."
Upon removing the back gates of the furnace and extricating the filter, I noticed that the filter did look a bit dirty. And by dirty, of course, I mean caked on filth that best resembled the mud used by indigenous tribes of the lower Amazon to warm their huts.
Now multiply this by two...
With great shame, I cleaned off the dirt with the aid of my vacuum cleaner, and then went out to Home Depot to buy a new filter. In the hour or so that I was gone, the house had warmed up by about 12 degrees.
Overboard and I discussed the incident and marveled at how we had been so good at changing the furnace filter in our condo, but had NEVER bothered to do so at our home during the YEAR we have lived here.
While the cable took another two days to normalize, I was able to watch the big game on TV, just not in HD (thus making it a touch more difficult to distinguish between the rain vs. sweat that was pouring down Rex Grossman's face as he wondered, "What the hell have I gotten myself into here?").
Better still, we didn't have to bundle up, and if anything, I stared in amazement at the amount of air now pushing its way through my home's vents.
The moral of the story: Bob Villa, I ain't. Oh well, at least I didn't have to sleep in my sweatshirt again.
