Things are moving, again.

This is gonna smart.  How much is...something we don't know, just yet.  

About three weeks ago, we had a...well.  An incident.  Our wonderful electrical provider decided in their infinite wisdom, full faith and loving care for the environment, to put in a wind farm a few years back.  And they swore, up down and sideways, that there was no way that was a replacement of any of the current plants...

...only to immediately take one offline, as soon as the wind farm came on line.  

This is not a good part of the country for that.  We do not have steady, stable, constant wind.  Not at all.  We have days where there's nothing, we have days where there's barely any...we have days where the winds are around forty, fifty miles an hour.  And gusts.  Did I mention wind gusts?  Lots of 'em.  Hard ones. 

So.  Three weeks or so ago, we had a power surge, then brown-out, and the heat pump started...acting funny.  And then died.  

We called for repair, they told us it'd be about five days.  They got us in really early--Monday, not Thursday--because a repair job scheduled for a few hours took a few minutes, instead.  Turns out, several fuses in the heat pump unit and the control panel had been fried by the surge.  Control panel was...not cheap to replace.  

When the guy offered to install something to prevent another surge from destroying something else on the heat pump, I took him up on it.  

That smarted.  Almost a thousand dollars because the religion espoused by the hard left fucked us over again (like it has done in the past in the winter).  

That was an unexpected expense.  

We are now moving on an expected one.  We've got one guy that came out and looked at our carport with an eye toward replacement today.  Another one's supposed to come out and do the same on Tuesday.  

We'll get the quotes sometime after the holiday weekend.  

I know this is going to smart, but I also know we've been saving a while, and can get this done, now (even if we had a thousand dollar emergency hit us right before we started moving on this...thanks to the fucking watermelons pushing hard for technology we simply don't, won't, and can't have to replace something that actually works).  What I don't know yet is even ballpark how much it's going to smart...but I do know it'll be actually done right this time.  

Current carport was very clearly built by Cletus and his brother Clyde, and their cousin/half-brother Donnie.  While they were drunk.  And didn't know nearly as much about how to do it as they thought they did. 

Yes, I've got a couple more things on my mental list, but they're way down on the priority scale...for the moment. 

We'll be looking into a whole-house surge protector, first.  Because clearly, the days of not having bloody surges are in the past.