January 18, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 869: Not a productive day in terms of writing (right now I am at -16 words) and I have one more marketing task I need to do before dinner, so I doubt I will get any more writing done today. I have a couple of excuses for why this happened (ie, I didn't just stare at a wall or constantly write and delete, which is what happens some days.)

First of all, this morning we had scheduled someone to come to talk to us about buying a heat pump for the house. You see, on Monday morning we got up to find the furnace wouldn't turn on. Someone was able to come out to get it going again, but we weren't surprised that he said that we really needed to consider replacing it.

Getting ready for the repair man on Monday, when I found the folder with old receipts, I discovered that what we had been calling the "new furnace," because it had replaced the 20+ year old furnace that was original to the house, was now 23 years old! And the "new thermostat" that we thought we had gotten about five years ago, was in fact at least 9 years old. How is it that time gets so distorted that way. As a professional historian, I really should be better at this sort of calculation. Anyway, the repair person strongly suggested we think pretty quickly about replacing this very old furnace with something new!

We had been thinking about a heat pump so that we could switch from gas to electric and so we could get in air conditioning, so this did seem like the time to see what options were available and what this would cost us. We have never felt the need of air-conditioning, except for about 2 weeks a year. But this summer was definitely hotter, for longer, than usual, and there is no reason to think that over-all this trend isn't going to continue.

And, since we are already scheduled to talk to our solar panel company about expanding our panels and putting in a battery system to handle our new EV, this is the time to do the new heat pump so we can be sure whatever we come up with in terms of solar will handle this new electrical demand.

Long story short, the morning was spent getting chores done, and doing my first walk in days (I started out slow with just 20 minutes, but no more pain then usual), to be ready to consulting with the man who came about heat pumps. Then I spent the 30 mins left before lunch to look at what I wrote yesterday (hence the -16 words, since cutting is almost always what happens when I edit.)

After lunch I needed to create the promotional newsletter that is to go out tomorrow. This took a little more time because I needed to get up to speed with the new free codes that Spotify has decided to give to authors who have audiobooks available on Spotify (all mine are.) After looking into these codes I decided to give away 15 of these codes each month for different books. This month I will be raffling out codes for the first boxed set of the mystery series. So, if you've been thinking about whether or not to subscribe to my monthly promotional newsletter on substack, this might be a good time to start. (smile)

So a busy day, just not for writing.

I am going to leave you with the one colorful bloom I found on my 20 minute walk, it is pretty slim pickings out there now. But we have at least 10 days of sun scheduled, so maybe between the rain and now sun, something more will bloom.