My plans for this first week back from Helsinki included some cultural and volunteering activities each day of the week. On some days, I had several to choose from, and I was doing my mental Tetris to fit in at least two things in one night.
On Wednesday, I was going to attend a concert, but I decided against it at the very last moment. I had zero time during the day to do anything except work, and the conference things began to pile up. Also, I knew that my upgraded phone and my new laptop had arrived, and I needed to start the transition.
When I returned home, I immediately noticed that it was a little bit colder than it should have been. Sometimes this happens when my Ecobee knows I am not at home, but it didn’t look like it was the case that time. I heard the HVAC working, but no heat was coming out of it. At first, I thought that I would wait till morning to call the service, but then I decided to leave them a message. It was already after 9 PM, and their AI assistant took my call. I told them that it could wait until morning, but asked them to leave a message for the staff.
On Thursday, I planned to work from home anyway. Since Anna was bringing the girls in the evening, and I was planning to attend a concert, I figured I would work from home, visit my mom during the lunch break, get the house ready, and then head to the concert. So at a glance, it was not a huge plan interruption. Except for when they called me at 7 AM, they said they only had afternoon appointments available, but they could put me on standby if someone canceled. I didn’t go to my mom because I was waiting, and finally, they called me after four to say that they were 45 minutes away.
I decided to visit my mom briefly, and messaged my neighbor that, most likely, I won’t be able to go to the concert. FInally, the repair person arrived and informed me that one really expansive part broke, and that he didn’t have it in his trunk, and hopefully tomorrow.
Theoretically, I still could go to the concert, but I was in a completely wrong mood for that, so I tried to do some more work and to get the house ready for the weekend. Things never break “on time,” but retrospectively, I was lucky that it was not too cold yet, so all of us didn’t get cold overnight. The bad part was that we couldn’t go anywhere far from the house, because the service was scheduled for “between 10 AM and 2 PM.” We went to the playground for a little bit, and returned home to wait for the repair. When a repair person arrived, they found one more problem and fixed it. It was great, but by then, it was already 2 PM so we couldn’t go to any of the museums.
In addition to this heater saga, my mom was upset that they were going to do a repair in her bathroom (do not ask me why she was upset about fixing things!), and there were several major issues at work.
However, today, four days later, I am glad that all of this ahppened when the outside temperature was 50F, not yesterday, when it was barely 30F with the wind making it feel even colder and several inches of snow overnight!
Hettie's Reflections 