Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I got an hour of sleep (I'm about to go back and try to get another hour or two -- wish me luck), and woke up hearing the beep my phone makes to let me know I've missed a call. So I got up, found the phone, saw a missed call from an unfamiliar Baltimore number, guessed what it probably was, and checked my messages. It was an oil company calling to arrange for me to meet their driver for a delivery, and saying that since they'd missed me, they wouldn't be able to deliver oil today. So I called back to do whatever needed to be done to make sure oil could be delivered, and the dispatcher got the driver on the radio and found out he'd already come here anyhow and replaced most of the air in that silver thing in my basement with oil. I hadn't thought to go look at the guage in the basement before calling, 'cause the message had said they couldn't deliver it today. Turns out what that really meant was "if my fill-pipe is behind a locked gate", which it isn't. Okay, that problem was pretty easy to fix: call up and find out the problem didn't really exist. *whew*

Where did the oil come from? A concerned friend paid for it and had it delivered here. I really hate needing this kind of help, but since I do need help, I'm damned lucky to have the friends I've got. And I am extremely grateful to this friend.

So I thank the friend who bought me oil, and I thank the Lord for granting me such friends (believe me when I say that I do not take for granted the number of people who help me in various ways (and the ones who'd like to help except that I'm so bad at asking for help)), and I pray that someday I'll be doing well enough to be the one helping out friends in need.

I'm celebrating in the obvious fashion: I turned on the furnace.

Actually, even more than the physical comfort of the warmth (it's already four Kelvins warmer than when I turned on the heat, and my fingers are working noticeably better as a result), I'm feeling the reduction in stress from not worrying that that last eighth of a tank might get used up while the weather's still cold enough for pipes to freeze. If we continue to get occasional sane-for-January breaks in this pretend-Baltimore-is-Buffalo cold, I can probably stretch this most-of-a-tank to Valentine's Day or later, and that ought to be late enough to not have to worry too much after that. [knock wood]

And by next winter I hope to have gotten through whatever paperwork and bureaucracy (I always have to look up the spelling of that word; can't I just call it ... "writingdeskocracy" or something?) to have government assistance with such problems so my friends won't have to worry quite as much. And maybe even a working fireplace.