To all the people who commented that Jared had been losing weight and I assured them that he hadn’t? Yeah, I was wrong. He’s down to 95lbs. The good news is that Sierra, now 5′2″, is catching up!
Today I was trying to talk to Jared about our plans to go see Wall-E (best movie ever - the Godfather sleeps with Luca Brasi), and he kept interrupting to ask when we were leaving. I wanted to explain that we were waiting to see when my special lady would arrive and would then go to whatever the next showing was, but Jared just could not stop interrupting. So, in my frustration, I did something dumb: I spoke Jared-ese.
Jared has his own way of talking sometimes and it’s important to model good speech patterns for him. So I often say things back to him with little corrections: “She bringed it.” “She brought it.” You get the point. But his other habit is that he has little routines for how he discusses things that disappoint him. And it’s an even worse idea to encourage that. But I was frustrated, and just couldn’t help myself. So as he’s interrupting to say, “When are we going to the movie?” I started quickly asking, “Can’t I talk about the plan? Is the plan cancelled? Is the plan over? Is the plan ruined? Do you want to ruin the plan? Are we done with the plan? Why can’t we have the plan?”
And he totally caved. “What’s the plan?”
That’s just going to make it more tempting next time. Bad, bad daddy.
My air conditioner stopped working yesterday. Part of the problem was that I hadn’t replaced the filter in a couple months (oops - I always forget that), but it was also low on whatever refrigerant they’re using nowadays. This morning I called our HVAC specialists, and they said they’d send somebody out this afternoon. The woman on the phone said that it was $110 for the visit, which only covers the first 30 minutes, $50/lb. for the refrigerant, and I’d probably need 3lbs. Ouch. Goodbye iphone 3G.
The reason it was running low is that I need to replace the blower on the inside of the house which has a very slow leak. Evidently systems that operate under pressure always develop leaks over time and it takes long enough to find and fix them (at over $100/hour) that they usually get fixed by being replaced. Since it’s $2,000 for a new blower, I’m happy to keep paying to top off the tank until the leak gets bad enough.
The way we picked this company to put in our heat pump in the first place is that the founder used to play cards with Kellie’s grandfather, and the heat pump that should have cost us $3,000 to put in was under $1,500. And that $2,000 for the blower? That’s friend prices. Nice deal, but who knows how much her family lost at the poker table over the years to get that discount?
Regardless, the repair guy came out, and I guess he must be the same person who has been coming to our house all along, because he remembered Kellie. And didn’t charge us a thing. It seems that he thought she was a pretty awesome customer, and now that I think about it, he didn’t charge us for the last visit either.
I’m going to miss having somebody around that has that effect on people.