The Book Report: Catching Up

I feel out of sorts and I know exactly why. This past Saturday, my furnace - the only furnace I have ever known (considering that it was installed the year before I was born) - tried to take itself out. Well, more accurately, the blower obliterated itself. I didn't know it was so unhappy! I would have intervened earlier, honest! The sad thing is, a part of me knew this was coming . . .

See, on Saturday night, my family and I were out dining at County Clare in celebration of my sister Michelle's birthday. (The food's great, by the by!) During the course of conversation, I mentioned a noise that I had heard the furnace making earlier that afternoon. I speculated (oh, so innocently!) that the furnace would be the next thing to go at my house and I wouldn't be surprised if we found ourselves replacing it pronto. After dinner, my brother-in-law, his sister and her husband went back to my house. My mom, sister and I went to my sister's house to pick up a few things and, most importanly, to get my pup-nephew Macca so that he could join the celebration with ice cream cake at my house. En route to my house, pup in tow, my brother-in-law called and said, "there's something definiately wrong with your furnace." He held the phone up and I heard a loud, horrible, terrible, growling, grinding noise. My furnace! Was it eating itself? Was it imploding? What was going on?

Mom called the furnace company and made arrangements for a technician to come out on Sunday morning. In the meantime, we turned off the air conditioning, kept everything closed up, cranked on the ceiling fans and hoped for the best. Yeah, those hopes died on Sunday morning. In the words of the tech, "you have big problems that are not going to be fixed today." And so, the beginning of the Great Loss of Air Conditioning of 2012. Mom and I passed Sunday largely in the dark so as to not throw off more heat in the house and intermittantly standing at the top of the basement steps to feel the cool air waft up towards us. In short, it was a long day and a miserable day. A day that gave me heat stroke.

Fast forward to today: the furnace has been serviced to work long enough to be replaced later this month. The air conditioning is once again pumping cool air (blessed, wonderful cool air) through my hallways and Mom and I are facing a large bill for a new furance and oil tank. Ahhh, the joys of home ownership!

So, what does all this mean for books? It means, in short, that I'm behind! My heat sickness is gone (yay!) and I passed much of the past few days sans reading. It was just too. hot. to read. And, even if I felt like doing anything other than sitting completely still, we kept the lights off, so I couldn't see a word. As a result, I'm still working my way through Shannon Hale's "The Goose Girl." I stopped in at the Greenfield Public Library yesterday and picked up Joanna Scott's "Follow Me" and have since added several books to my to-read list. And I'm so looking forward to going to meet Deborah Harkness, author of "A Discovery of Witches" and the newly released "Shadow of Night" on Tuesday!

What have you all been up to?