This is what cold looks like.

 This is our first Christmas without my Dad, and unfortunately, Mom's neediest times have collided with my busiest. Last night, we invited Mom over to have dinner and decorate the tree, just so she wouldn't be home alone.

The first thing she said was a querulous, “It’s cold in here,” and it was. In the hour and a half I'd been home, I'd put away groceries, changed clothes, unloaded the dishwasher, started a load of laundry, pulled the ornaments out of the coal room and cooked a more elaborate dinner than usual, so I was plenty warm, but Mom is tiny. I turned up the heat, a job the programmable thermostat should have done for me, but my husband has been known to borrow the batteries from the thermostat to run some other device.

A little while later, I realized that nothing had happened.  I wasn’t terribly surprised. On Monday, my husband’s car refused to start after he’d already left for the hospital in mine, and I had to stand in line at the auto parts store, holding a heavy battery, behind a guy with 8” of butt crack showing. On Tuesday, my dog, decked out in full Rocky Mountain winter regalia, brought home a skunk. These are not major problems, especially in year when the yardstick has been not "is anybody dead" but "how many?" But jeez, when am I due for some good karma?

After wrapping my mother in a blanket, I checked the batteries, fiddled with the thermostat, turned it from heat to A/C and back, changed the temperature, and so on. I checked the breaker box. I looked to make sure the basement hadn’t flooded in the 20 minutes since I was last down there. Then, being a sensible woman (emphasis on the latter), I called the HVAC guy.

“Did you check the batteries in the thermostat?” he asked before he agreed to come over. 

My spouse arrived home, more than a little peeved that I had impugned his manhood by calling the HVAC guy. “But why?” he asked, as if I’d announced I’d invested our life savings in a yak farm.

Um, because it’s winter in Colorado, Christmas is in three days, the kids are coming home, we have church services all over the place and we’re expecting 900 people for Christmas dinner?

He said, “You should have waited. I bet it’s something really simple. Did you check the batteries?” He took the batteries out of the thermostat, thereby erasing all the programming, fiddled with the thermostat, flipped all the breakers and fouled up every electrical appliance in the house despite the breaker for the furnace being clearly labeled FURNACE, looked down the stairs to make sure the basement wasn’t flooded, scratched some body parts. Then, being a man, he came back and fiddled with the thermostat some more.

The HVAC guy came and checked the batteries, fiddled with the thermostat, asked about the breakers and ventured into the non-flooded basement.  There he monkeyed with the switch that’s supposed to keep homeowners from blowing up their own homes, but although it had first appeared to be stuck, it worked just fine. 

“I think the transformer’s bad,” he pronounced. “We’re getting power in but no power out.”

He replaced the transformer, but the new one failed to transform our silent furnace into one that was working.

The two men scratched some body parts. “Hmm,” the HVAC guy said, “I wonder what that means.” Mr. Lonesome just grunted.

“Something must not be grounded,” I said. The HVAC guy rewarded me with a patronizing smile. I wanted to kick him in the shins, but I needed him to fix my furnace. My husband just looked pained; clearly I’d trespassed on man ground.

“It’s pretty crowded down here, don’t you think?” he asked. Yeah, three people in a 900 foot basement is one female too many.

So I went upstairs, cleaned up the kitchen, decorated the tree, wrapped some Christmas gifts. By then it had been two and a half hours since the transformer discussion. I was keeping track because although the HVAC guy is a good enough friend to come over after supper during a holiday week, he earns considerably more per hour than either my spouse or I. Wonder of wonders, just as I was about to shout down the stairs that I was going to bed (where flannel sheets and a down comforter awaited), the heat kicked on and two men appeared, neither one of them looking at me.

“Send me a bill?” my husband was asking.

"D'worry about it,” the HVAC guy replied. “Buy me a beer sometime.”

“What was it?” I asked. I always like to know, because I can almost guarantee that particular problem will never happen again. We have owned this house for 25 of its 100 years and have had 476 unique problems, the only repeats being electrical connections that jiggled loose when large herds of feral children thundered through the house. That happens a lot, but nothing else ever does, so knowing what we’ve already fixed speeds up the process of elimination.

There was a moment of silence. I raised my eyebrows, and my spouse mumbled something.

“lctrcl.” 

The HVAC expert was more honest but hardly more voluble:

 “grndwr.”

It was a small win, but it will have to be enough, because today is another day and there’s a city crew at the end of our block digging up the water main, possibly to stop the geyser that seems to have erupted.