Having mailed our annual holiday newsletters on Saturday, I am certainly hoping the "Phone Guys" show up today as promised (again). We were to have our phone installed last Friday, but the technician discovered no cable from the pole at the road had been run to the house. You'd think the phone company (Qwest) would have guessed that when I repeated several times "this is new construction." Sigh.
So, we were told on Friday that someone would be out Saturday or Monday at the latest to lay a cable for us and get the phone installed. Mmm. A call back to Qwest on Tuesday afternoon at 3:15 p.m. (25 minutes; 21 spent on "hold") resulted in this comment "Your account is on hold due to the weather."
My question was "Well, it's winter and will be for several months. What must happen in order for me to get a phone before spring?" Sigh, again.
The woman to whom I spoke was pleasant and said she'd find out for me. I also asked her to inquire "How long should I wait to 'hear' from the Buried Services Department -- doesn't the title BURIED SERVICES seem just so appropo? -- to call before I call back believing they'd forgotten about me?"
Answers: expect a call today, Wednesday or call back Thursday.
As soon as I hung up with her, my cell phone rang . . . a guy from "Buried Services" telling me they'd just gotten the order that day and will be out tomorrow.
In the meantime, we are now giving out our cell phone number for return calls; we have a minimal account as we normally only use the cell very little. At $.45 a minute over our allotment, our next bill is going to be outrageous if we don't get the landline soon!
That aside, the annual Davis Holiday Newsletter included our new home phone number (which was assigned to us about two weeks ago). Sigh and triple sigh.
Meanwhile, our general contractor is coming today to finish up little details such as rehanging the mirror in a bathroom, fixing some small concrete problems in the basement and such.
We have locked into a mortgage with Chase Bank at 5.125% which is far better than we'd thought we'd get . . . just two weeks ago they quoted us 6.375%! Of course, we'd hoped to sell the hunting property and NOT have a mortgage, but so it goes. It's still better than our first mortgage rate in 1980 (the last recession. . . we're not good at timing stuff like this I guess) when our interest rate was 14%!!
We now have about 8" of snow on the ground. Unlike the sort of wet, heavy stuff we are accustomed to in Michigan, this snow is light and fluffy. Glenn hired a local guy to plow our drive occasionally as we are not equipped to do so ourselves; first plowing occurred yesterday. We are expecting another snowfall beginning Thursday evening and into Friday. Definitely, we'll have a white Christmas to report . . . if we are able to call family by then!
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