I’ve been playing the “is it cold enough to turn on the heat inside my apartment yet?” game the past few weeks.

Part of that is my Midwest stubbornness of “it’s not December yet, turning on the heat seems like a poor choice at the moment when we can just throw on another quilt or sweater and heat up another hot cocoa while watching this movie.” Part of it, though, was Tippy Toe’s most recent needed car repair. Back in the summer, as I was driving the just started to be repaved Business 30 between Mount Vernon and Lisbon after covering a story in Lisbon, the blower motor in my car stopped working.

Well, stopped working at the highest speed, I should say. Over the next few weeks, I troubleshot – it only is impacting the top speed of the fan’s operation, and only after the fan runs for about a minute before it inevitably stops working… I bought a resistor to possibly replace under my glove box and gave up on that after an hour of fumbling and dropping the tool I was trying to connect to the socket I needed to untighten.

During the summer and early fall, not having moving air in a car is not terrible. You can crack a window to cool down, and if you’re not making a muti-hour trip, you’ll be fine. It’s a repair that can be punted down the road.

And then the cool down of Halloween hit, and I ran the heater in my car for the first time in the season. And it worked for about a week running warm air at the medium temperature setting. But then, the blower motor started seizing up on that speed as well, leaving me with only the two lowest speeds functional.

And with temperatures only getting colder realizing that “you definitely do need warm air in the winter to be able to drive this car,” I had to finally get that repair made.

Bud’s discovered and confirmed right away my suspicion – blower motor was getting power and had a ground, it’s just a 15-year-old blower motor that needed to be replaced. Having done one of those in a previous car and not looking forward to contorting my larger frame into this car’s smaller footwell, I let them order the parts and fix it.

With the office and my car both having heat, it’s coming down to the apartment again as my last hold out on turning on the heat. And I will continue to say I can add another blanket around burrito me until December finally arrives.

Oh, would you look at that? It finally did.