June 28

Today is the day called "Let's Find Out if The Home Warranty We've Been Shelling Out For All These Months Will Actually Help Us."  A home warranty is essentially insurance.  You pay a set fee (about 500/year) and in return, when anything breaks in your house, the home warranty people fix or replace it.  At least, that's what they say.  We've never used it.  Today, though, I have people coming to look at the garage door opener and the kitchen vent.  The garage door opener has been spotty since we moved here (I can usually get it to work but I sometimes have to wait outside the garage pushing the button for a long time to make that happen).  The kitchen vent does work, technically (it blows air) but its power is so limited that it's effectively impossible to cook anything that produces any kind of odor or aroma.  That's why I almost always either grill outside or make chinese food.  I'd like to start pan frying fish, or roasting stuff in the oven, as I did in our old apartment.  But right now doing so involves smelling up the whole house.  A new vent might change all that.

So it'll be a morning of service men, not at all the kind of morning I enjoy.  At the same time, our gardener and our cleaning lady are coming.  So Eliot should be utterly and totally insane.  All these invaders!  They must be fought off!  And what better way but by barking at them or, better, by taking his blanket in his mouth and shaking it back and forth with extreme vigor.  That will show them!  Or something.