All By Myself

I lived on my own for a long time, maybe two years even. That was in an apartment, though, with no cats. Yesterday was an interesting day. I woke up at 4:3o to a horrific sound, that to me signified my house exploding in some way. It was a loud roaring kind of sound, coming from the laundry room. Besides the washer and dryer, it houses the furnace, the water heater, and the water uberfilter we probably don't need. I ran up and hit the oil heaters emergency shutoff switch. Nothing happened, of course, because it was already off, because it was broken, but I'll get to that later. I studied the water heater, and determined that it was not exploding, and neither were the washer, or dryer. I looked at the water filter. It's a pretty big contraption, coming up almost to my chest, and looks like two tall, skinny garbage cans. One of those cans is just full of salt pellets. The other side has all kinds of neato electronic thingers, but I couldn't see any of them until I took the lid off. The electronic thingers then told me that the filter was about 17 minutes from being done with it's self cleaning procedure. I shut the laundry room door, cutting out most of the noise, but was still not able to get back to sleep.

My house was cold, and it's hard to get to sleep when I'm cold. The furnace does this thing where it senses that the house is too cold, and it tries to ingnite itself to warm everything up. Most of the time, it succeeds, but sometimes it doesn't, and it turns itself off until someone goes and looks at it. At first, it did that maybe once a week, then every couple days, and then every day. Yesterday, I reset it once in the morning, and it worked just fine, but was tripped out again by the time I got home. I did the same procedure that I always do: first I go look at the thermostat and verify that the house really is cold, and it's not just me. The actual temperature was definatly 5 or 10 degrees less than the setpoint. I went in the laundry room to see that the emergency switch was in the on position. I looked at a little gauge on the front of the thing that says what the temperature of the heater is, and it was pointing down and to the left instead of down and to the right. I looked at the red button under the gauge and saw that it was lit, indicating a tripped status. I pushed the button and listened to make sure that the sounds coming from the contraption were the sounds it is supposed to make. It made good sounds for a few seconds, and then no sounds at all. I tried again, and failed again. I looked at the little plastic bulb thing that is supposed to have oil in it, and saw that it had oil in it. I even went outside and banged on the oil tank and looked inside it and saw that it was still over half full. I went on weather.com to see if it would be warm enough the next day to just decide I didn't need a heater until fall comes around. Unfortunately, the forcast was a high of about 48, with a low that night of less than freezing. Only then did I find the oil company's number and call them. Even more than working on equipment around the house that I don't know very much about, I hate having to call the people that do know about it to come and work on it. I don't like calling people for some reason. I didn't have anyone to do it for me anymore, though.

After surviving a treacherous phone call to a stranger, I decided to clean up the cat box so the house didn't smell as bad to someone not acclimated to it. For the past few days, I had been unwisely giving the cats copious amounts of milk. They do this thing when they look at you where they are just really small with fur and these eyes and little paws just sitting there looking all cute and stuff, especially if you are eating cereal. Well, lots of milk is bad for cats. Their poop is supposed to be solid. It's not supposed to make the litter box into one giant brick so that when you go to scoop it, it just takes one scoop, and a massively strong arm. I am not supposed to touch kitty poop, so I had already leak checked and donned latex gloves. For some reason I decided to forgo the surgical mask that time. I lifted up the box to the already almost full trash can. Anyone reading this must already know what happed next, but for some reason I didn't see it coming. A good deal of the contents of the box actually do go into the trash bag. Other bits make it into the can, but not the bag. They rest goes pretty much every where else. The most disgusting bits that have the consistency of toothpaste go onto the side of the trash bag, and one of my gloves.

I was kind of upset at this point. My brain was just full of all the things I had to do in order to right this mistake, and trying to put those steps in a logical order. I have no idea how doctors, or nurses, or other health workers deal with biohazards, because I've never worked in that field. My only experience with substances that I don't want to touch involve nuclear radiation. I was treating the kitty litter as radioactive contamination, and I had just causes a pretty horrible spill. That whole area is carpeted.

So, apparently I can do just fine on my own. I just freaked out a little at all the stuff that was new to me. Also, I guess I kind of miss my old job.