maintenance

I usually have preventative maintenance done on the furnace every summer. This year I had the flue cleaned (also an annual summer task) but never bothered to set up an appointment for the furnace. What could one year matter? It turns out that not being cleaned and maintained made it cranky, and I had to keep pushing the reset button. After a scheduling mess-up this morning, it's been done now. Probably the bill will be higher than usual because I think it counts as an emergency call, even though I kept telling the dispatcher that it wasn't an emergency. It is true that if one is acclimated to 55 F in the house, 50 or lower feels very cold, enough to motivate me to wander into the basement repeatedly to push the magic button.

This week I had a bunch of fluids exchanged in the car. It is surprising how expensive getting new transmission fluid can be, but I'm glad to have it done in advance instead of late. They also wanted to sell me two new tires. I said no. They were a bit miffed and made me sign a disclaimer saying that they warned me. Tire dust is such a huge contributor to air pollution that I would like to buy lower dust tires, but I'm not sure they even exist.