etc.

About three days into living in The House, we started hearing a low, whirring sound coming from our furnace fan every time the air conditioner thermostat kicked in. So Mike took a look at it and figured there was definitely something in the fan drum, and from the look of all the dust and debris around the furnace we thought it wise to have the ducts/furnace/AC cleaned.

Two days later, Sears came in to flush and sterilise our ducts and sure enough, rocks, wood and other building debris were sucked into their super-duper power vacuum system (the basement in The House was finished in 1996 and we figured that the ducts hadn’t been cleaned at least since then, but most likely for much longer than that). Two days after that, the furnace cleaning guy came to take care of the furnace and AC unit. Things looked pretty murky in there and the worst part wasn’t even the fact that it took him 4 hours to complete an estimated 1.5 hour job, the worst part was that in all his 27 years of cleaning furnaces, he had never pulled one of these out of the fan drum. Till today the manner in which the doomed critter managed to find his way into his chamber of death is a mystery.

The cleaning guy was so good natured about the whole thing that I photographed his work, took down his email address, and sent him the pictures, along with a grateful missive extolling his excellent performance in the area of critter extraction and removal.