The "South" is Cold!

The fabulous Dan came today and started painting Kiltz (primer) on the wood panel ceiling of our back room (which, with brick walls, ugly dark carpet, and almost no lighting has, up to now, looked very cave-like).  He even Kiltzed most of the kitchen walls before he left, which means that my kitchen now looks considerably better than it did this morning.  I had forgotten about the noxious Kiltz fumes, though, and had to quickly open as many windows as I could (the back porch windows are ancient and Ed forbade me to even try to open any more after I nearly brained myself with a storm window) before we all dropped dead.  Unfortunately, it is frighteningly cold here already (I keep having the paranoid suspicion that we took a wrong turn in South Carolina and are actually in North Dakota, but everyone we meet is in on the joke), so the open windows, while letting out the fumes, brought the temperature of the house down to 64 degrees.  If I hadn’t found my fuzzy bedroom slippers in a box yesterday (great moment of triumph!), I’d have spent the rest of the day huddled in bed.  The furnace guy came today, and says the furnace is running well.  In fact, he says it is a fabulous furnace, the best there is, which is quite heartening.  Unfortunately, he isn’t the member of the furnace team who is going to install a metal pipe into the furnace chimney so that we won’t be poisoned by carbon monoxide escaping from the funky old chimney, so we can’t actually use our snazzy, upscale furnace.  Thank goodness for slippers and wool socks, eh?