Hope all of you had a happy holiday and will enjoy the best new year
ever!!

Our X-mas Eve was a bit skewed.  I woke at about 3:00 a.m. to find it
was cold in the house.  I checked the thermostat to raise the
temperature a bit - and found the furnace was not working!   Son Chris
checked the fuse box, tried three times installing brand-new fuses - -
nothing happened!  It also happened to be our coldest days  with
nights at 13-15 degrees F.  Great!!  A dead furnace in frigid weather.
We had only one radiator-type space heater for the whole place, to
heat some 2000+ square feet!!  

Call a repairman?  Loathe to "disturb" some poor guy on X-mas Eve and
ruin *his* holidays, but mainly 'cuz I knew they'd charge an
arm-and-a-leg extra for being dragged out on the weekend, we decided
to wait until Monday.  We got through Friday as best we could.  My son
Greg was coming from Virginia to spend Christmas with us so I got him
on his cell-phone while he was enroute - to warn him it was *cold*
here, couldn't even take a shower, and he might want to stay at a
motel or something.  

Meanwhile, my car had also died during the week and I was housebound
for a few days.  Hitched a ride to Home Depot and got a couple of good
space heaters.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, Greg stopped on his way
and bought two himself!!  So now we had heaters for each room!   When
he arrived, Greg, an engineer, tried to find a fix for the furnace.
New fuses didn't work for him either.  He jiggled the thermostat
somehow but nothing happened.  Until about 15 minutes later, we felt
heat coming through the vents.  Voila!!  The old furnace healed
itself!  Greg has no idea what he did to the thermostat to get it
moving again, but we now had the hottest house in town!!!

A new thermostat is on our shopping list.  Even the old car is moving
again - on its own.   Must be the weather.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ONE AND ALL!!!!!!

 Jeanne