There goes Banjo's college fund

The sudden cost of a new boiler and a new liner has me gasping. Clearly I am in the wrong line of work and I could make a lot of money installing this stuff – especially to people who are stuck and don’t want to be without heat when it’s supposed to be in the single digits tonight. They installed the new boiler on Monday and were there at until about 9:00 at night before they realized it's still not venting correctly - but not because fo the new boiler - it's because the chimney liner is decomposing. Fabulous. I will just have to continue my refrain…oh well. There’s really not much we can do and I will continue to be thankful that this didn’t happen while we are supposed to be in Virginia and not know we have no heat and burst pipes.

I officially decided to take it easy last night since my legs were on fire from leg cramps the entire day. I hesitated doing it because I didn’t want to look like a weenie at work but I gave in and elevated my legs at work. I had to move my monitor and keyboard but I was still able to work and it did help. I was reading online looking for ways to help with the leg cramps. These are beyond normal leg cramps – they start in the upper thigh and shoot all the way down to my feet. When I got home from work, I told Pete I had to get off my feet because of the pain and once I actually sat down and relaxed, I started crying. Some causes of the pains are the obvious – on my feet too much, also crossing my legs while sitting. So I am trying to avoid those things and I also read that drinking more water, adding more calcium, elevating my legs and doing some stretching exercises should all help. Last night I plopped on the couch and propped up my feet and addressed Christmas cards. Pete was a sweetie and said he’d make me whatever I wanted for dinner and he made me two grilled cheese sandwiches. Yum! I also had two big glasses of milk and several glasses of water and I had a night of NO leg cramps (or if I did they were so mild that they didn’t wake me). And today I have aches in my legs – but nothing like yesterday.

Hopefully when I get home tonight there will be heat. Let’s see, Friday night – no heat. Saturday late afternoon we finally had heat. Sunday we had heat. On Monday there was no heat while they replaced the boiler and then we had heat Monday night – until it turned itself off because of bad venting…so no heat again this morning. Thank goodness we have separate heat upstairs.

I have more Christmas shopping to do but the idea of walking around the mall makes me want to cry. Fortunately, I don’t have tons to do but now that I’ve missed the shipping deadline I will have to brave some stores. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow night will be a better night for shopping.