Furnaces and year-end and cooking (oh my)

We met with the (very talkative) furnace sales rep on Monday evening. I know nothing about furnaces or air conditioners and I don’t really care to learn. So Adam took care of the details and I signed on the line. We went with York rather than Trane since Trane doesn’t yet make a modulating furnace. In total, the cost fell about where I thought it would. (Still painful.) Citi offers 6 months no interest and we’ll see where everything else stands at that point to see what we do from there. Being slightly more positive about this whole thing, the new furnace is rated 95% efficient and will have 58,000 BTU max compared to the 100,000 BTU, 40% efficient beast currently in the basement. So our gas bill should go down. Woo. Installation is set for February 2nd.

Nothing much else going on these days. Month-, Quarter-, and Year-end are going fine so far. As much as I complain about working that first Saturday of the year, it fell in such a way this year that I was able to get a day ahead. And not come in at 6:30 on day two. So that was nice. It’s technically only day five and I’m already done with all of inventory and have made good headway on my quarterly and sales reports. On the flip side, I did absolutely no preparation to roll the year on all my files so I’m accumulating quite a stack of 2009 paperwork with nowhere to go yet. Bad planning, but (almost) unavoidable because of how strange the end of the year was. Stupid NAFTA.

The calendar looks depressingly blank for most of this month. I’ve got IMA on the 20th and we’ll be going to see Cinderella (in ballet form) on the 29th. Really, that’s about it. I recently got the new issue of the Rachael Ray magazine and I picked up a Cooking for 2 at Walmart. Between the two of us we were able to come up with a fair-sized list of new recipes to try out. My cooking blog has been languishing, totally ignored for awhile since I wasn’t making anything new. Trying to reverse that trend. But still use up what’s in the house at the same time. We have so much stuff in the freezers we could probably not go shopping (except for items like milk) for a couple months.