Drip. Drip. Drip.

One of the things we have noticed here in our new hometown is that delivery people and contractors always show up early for appointments. Whether it is the floor guys or the plumber or anyone else, they all seem to show up at our house between 30 minutes and an hour before our appointment is scheduled for. Now, granted this is much better than being late or than not making appointments at all and having large windows where they "may show up between 1 and 6 pm", but it is still somewhat annoying to tell them to show up at 9am and have the doorbell ring at 8:15.

And this happened once again this morning, as our furnace guy showed up 45 minutes early, and caught me in the midst of my Raisin Bran and caught K. still asleep. I don't think we've mentioned the problems with our furnace here before, but from the very first time we laid eyes on the house the furnace has been leaking out of a valve. Now, our home inspector pointed this out, and the previous owners agreed to fix it, and they did indeed have people out who claimed to fix it. But when we showed up in July, it was still leaking. And when I say leaking, I mean that the five gallon bucket that the previous owners had set up to catch water fills up every 4 days or so. So clearly this is something we want fixed. So we called the furnace guy they had used who came back out and said that it was just some dirt which had gotten into the valve, and he cleaned it out again and said that it would now be all fixed.

Which of course it wasn't. And several weeks went by with us emptying the bucket twice a week. And then we had the guy back out, and he brought a bunch of other people who all stood around looking at our furnave and trying different things and thought that maybe possibly they had fixed it. Which they hadn't. So today they came back out and tried some more things. I'll let you know how that goes.

Now, one of the interesting questions is who is going to be paying for all of this work. Technically, we have already bought the house and so one might think we should pay but on the other hand the sellers signed a legal document saying they fixed the problem so one might think they should pay. In reality, our real estate agent told us to have the furnace guy send her the bill and they would work it out, and our guess is that she will pick up a reduced tab. Which is just one of the reasons why we would highly recommend our agent to any of you moving to town.

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On an unrelated note, we had our first dinner guest over last night as I invited another new faculty member over. We cooked a delightful pasta primavera with the fresh squash picked out of our garden, and let him gush over how much he loved our house. A good time was had, and it felt like just the next step in actually establishing a life here in the community. Which is a good feeling indeed. I think we had a total of like 3 dinner events at our home in the three years we lived in our previous apartment because that is just Not Something One Does In The Big City, and I think here we should hit that by apple harvest.