Adventures in Cold and Fear

Around 8:00 last night, I started to smell a chemical like smell, which no one else smelled, but then they smelled it too: burning rubber or plastic, kind of like melting crayons. Long story short, although the furnace itself did not smell, it was coming up through the vents with the hot air. I called the furnace repair after hours number, and someone called back and said he would be here in a half hour.

At which point the fear set it. I am so much better with this stuff now, but I completely slid back to the old me: holding so still that I was nearly paralyzed with fear, fear of the furnace blowing up or the house burning down, or both. It sounds ridiculous to say this is something I've always been afraid of, but it is. I don't know why. My parents, who were so fearful of many things, must have instilled it in me somehow. Many years ago, when R was a baby, we felt the tremor of a small earthquake, and the house shook, and I was convinced it was the furnace blowing up (it was where we lived before here) and I fainted.

I was very, very scared. Although I stayed at my desk, waiting for the doorbell, I quietly shoveled things into a tote bag, planning to push my computer and the various chargers in at the last minute, whenever the repairman said "Get out!" He never did, of course.

He was very nice, especially for a guy who had been called out of home on a cold Saturday night, and the Hubs dealt with him, which was also nice for me. The motor is dead. We'll have a new one tomorrow morning -- Monday -- and in the meantime, it's getting colder. It's quite cold outside today, actually, and there were flurries this morning. It's very windy.

Once I lost the fear of imminent fiery destruction, I was fine, although it did take me sometime to lose the physical tension I had built up. But I wasn't worried about the cold. We all put layers on and burrowed under blankets. The family room, which is where I've been sleeping, has its own electric baseboard heat, which the rest of the house is bleeding out, but it's not so terrible in here, and I slept great, til 9:00 even, warm and cozy. The front of the house is down to the low sixties, which is what some people set their houses to, I guess. It'll get colder tonight, and the bathroom is already plenty cold, but you know, we're not living in a box under a bridge; it's a house with sturdy walls and a roof, and it can't go down to an unlivable temperature in just 36 hours, so we'll be fine. Although I already have so many layers on, it's getting hard to set my hands on the keyboard.

So there you go. Keep warm out there in Internet land!


WATCHING HARRY POTTER AND SOMETHING OR OTHER :: ENTRY #1931
READING: The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards