When we arrived yesterday and opened the door from our living room toward the golf course, here’s what we saw. We’d planted a small flowerless poinsettia last year. It had been a luncheon centerpiece and door prize in about a 4″ pot. This year it’s magnificant. What a lovely Christmas-y greeting.

Today we’ll unpack and clean. I have a beauty salon appointment at 10:00. John will go with me and shop for groceries.

But we have a slight problem: Last night our next door Saginaw neighbor, Connie, called us.

We’d purchased a device called a “Honeywell Winter Watcher” which allowed us to plug in a light which would be visible in case our house temperature fell below 45 degrees. Connie had agreed to monitor the light. (She can see the window where we placed the lamp from her kitchen window.)

Last night she got home and the light was on. It was only 17 degrees outside when she called us. She doesn’t have access to the house but she wanted to advise us that the “warning light” was on.

Last week we had the furnace serviced so we”re fairly certain it’s just a problem with the way it was set. Maybe John didn’t leave enough of a range between the furnace setting and the setting on the “Watcher.” But we won’t know until John’s friend, George, can go into our house and check to make sure everything is working. We may have to have the thermostat replaced. Whatever it takes, hopefully George can handle it for us. We’re a little far to have a problem like this develop. It obviously bothered John all night. He slept very little.

Today is Thursday. I didn’t feel well Tuesday and Wednesday with a major digestive problem. It wore me out, so I was exhausted and slept like a rock.

So hopefully there’s no problem at home. As soon as John can reach George and have him check things out, he’ll feel better.

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Friday George was able to go into our Saginaw house and check out the warning signal. But everything was fine. The device was just set too close to the thermostat setting. Moving the dial on the light to a lower setting turned it off. Now we can be fairly certain that the light won’t come on unless the lower temperature is reached.