Morning all. I woke up this morning to the sound of the neighbors dogs going crazy. Apparently they were in a stand off with one of the feral cats in the neighborhood. The cat was just out of reach and it drove them crazy. No animals were hurt. It was a strange way to wake up though as we don’t have any dogs at the moment. So the day has begun. Shall we see what the prompt gives us today. Timers set for fifteen minutes.
I think this might actually be a result of too many cliche-ed holiday movies. But it could be fun, especially with a dark family secret or maybe a couple of skeletons buried in the basement.
Thursday, January 11th: The window fogged up.
The window fogged up. She sighed. The heater was out again. She sighed again, her breath causing another mist to fog the glass as her warm breath made contact. She turned away from the window, wondering why she was bothering to look outside when there was so much to do indoors.
It sounded like a fairytale when she first heard of it. A call from a lawyer, a long lost relative leaving her a house in the idyllic countryside. She was certain that at some point in her rather nomadic life she dreamed of such a story and a home to call her own. She knew she had seen quite a few movies with that premise. Usually those stories came with a companion the heroine despised at first and then fell head over heals in love with.
‘All I got was a temperamental heating system,’ she thought. ‘And I doubt out on again off again relationship is heading towards eternal love.’
As Dana made her way downstairs and towards the ancient heating system’s heart she suspected that they were heading more for a costly replacement than a love affair. ‘Mybe I’ll fall in love with a new heating system.’
Despite the chill, Dana found herself smiling as she pictured the scene in her mind’s eye. Romantic music played in the back ground while she hugged her new heating system, frolicking in a field of flowers instead of descending into the basement.
She let the image go as she reached the home of her current heating system and studied the now silent machinery. In the three weeks since her arrival she learned that silence was never a good thing. Dana took a deep breath and began running through the checklist of things to check, buttons to push, levers to shift.
The combination of efforts along with alternating cajoling and cursing managed to cause the machinery to groan back into life. For a few moments int sounded torturous, then whatever grumbles it had were worked out and the machinery began to maintain a constant sound. She would neve call it purring. That was a term reserved for the well-tuned motors of sports cars. The heater sounded resigned, as if it accepted its fate in life even if it wasn’t too terribly pleased by the hand fate dealt it.
More importantly, when Dana went to the vents, heat started to come from the depths of the machine. It would bear monitoring but for now, the heater was working. Dana left the basement and reminded herself to make certain the wood was brought in for her one working fireplace.
It was the only one she managed to get fixed before the weather turned. It had a working chimney and all of the details worked well. Other chimneys in the house needed repointing or rebuilding and as she was told, this weather was not ideal for repairing brick. She had an appointment with the necessary workmen for the time when the weather turned, but for now, she had the ancient heater and the one working fireplace.
It was this room that she made her hub. She had a bed on one side and most of her personal belongings, at least the ones not in storage, heaped to the side of the room. She had a table that served as her command station and while she did cook down in the kitchen, she kept many or her canned food items up here just in case the rest of the house froze in the night.
Ten til Midnight 