A New Year's Miracle

In the past week and a half we have experienced, not one, but two, minor in the grand scheme of things, miracles.

But to me they are miracles and that is why I must share them with you.

Of course, with me, there's no such thing as a short story so for the first one we must go back four and a half years. It was June of 2003 and I was towards the end of my first trimester in my pregnancy with Ella. I travelled to Europe with my parents to visit my brother Mike, who was living and working in Germany, and then for all of us to tour around the surrounding areas for about 10 days. The trip in itself is worthy of it's own post because traveling through Germany, Switzerland and Austria with my parents was full of many memories that deserve to be shared with my blogging friends!

While I hiked in the Alps in Switzerland (most beautiful place I've been) Matt and his father were back at our place working on a little project. Our kitchen originally had a wall half way through it - making one very small kitchen and on the other side of the wall, a small breakfast nook/junk room. Our plan in redoing our kitchen was to knock out this wall, making one large flowing kitchen. Problem was this was a weight bearing wall and supposedly it was going to cost alot of money to secure and then remove. Also, our kitchen radiator was built into that wall. Can't leave that out because it's really the point of this long drawn out story.

Matt took advantage of me being away to risk our house falling down and added a support beam and removed the wall and radiator himself. Remember that was in June 2003. That was the last time that we had heat in our kitchen. It's made for some pretty unpleasant winter mornings and a yearly threat to Matt that I will divorce him if I have to go through another winter without heat. It's been 3 1/2 years so I think he's called my bluff! I've been using what might be considered a more urban approach to warming the area by turning on all the gas burners - just for a short time because I do know it isn't safe. But it is a quite effective way to warm your hands up. Again, I know it's not safe but we do have a Carbon Monoxide detector - at least I think we did until the batteries started dying and Matt took them out in the middle of the night. Hmmm....

Anyway - to sum it all up - a few months ago Matt pulled out one of our kitchen cabinets and installed a baseboard heater. Unfortunately it didn't work and Matt couldn't call our plumber because we used a different plumber to install our new heating system and didn't want the old one to see the new one's work so we had to find a new plumber and he came the day before he was leaving for Disney World for a week and then forgot about us until two weekends ago when we called him to come fix another plumbing problem and I begged Matt to have him look at the heater again and he did.....AND he fixed it! Phewwww...deep breath needed after the longest run-on sentence ever. Did you follow that? Me neither! Anyway - our kitchen isn't warm and toasty yet (but it's still much much warmer) because the fan to the heater isn't connected yet, but I'm confident that by 2009 it should up and running. All in all it's truly a miracle that it's almost finished and I don't have resort to anymore drastic threats to have a warm kitchen.

The second New Year's miracle is that we sold our Pathfinder. It had been sitting for 2 YEARS. It seemed every time Matt would fix one part on it, another one would go. Once it got into running condition about 6 months ago, Matt cleaned it up and took pictures. Last Sunday he figured now was a good a time as any to put those pictures up on Craig's list - and hallelujah - three days later it was gone! As in sold. Not stolen or anything. Because I wouldn't be saying hallelujah about that. At least not out loud.

And guess what we're doing with the money? Finishing the kitchen project from 2003!!!