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The Terror of Having Someone In My House
Being a recluse is exhausting.
A man is coming to check my furnace. There’s no way around it. I try to keep it to one visit every two years. I have a carbon monoxide detector. I probably won’t die.
I guess normal people just wake up and say, “Oh, the guy’s coming today,” and go about their lives.
I’ve been preparing for this visitation for two days.
First I changed the furnace filter, which is 16x25x4. These filters are $25 each. I only change them once per season. They need to be changed more often.
A hauled the dirty filter up the basement steps and a mummified mouse fell onto my kitchen floor.
This is the kind of thing you don’t want people to see.
And the cobwebs. Oh my god, the cobwebs.
My basement is a hole dug in the ground. The timbers in the ceiling still have bark on them. The floor is dirt, or mud if the basement floods.
My house is over a hundred years old, but somehow the basement is much, much older.
I almost never see spiders, but my basement could be used as a movie set for Dracula. I’ve spent the last two evenings down there with a yard stick and a roll of Bounty trying to clean the spider webs enough so that…
