Thursday, January 10, 2008

It's Gonna Get Cold In Here

Joel and Maggie, 2004 or 05

Our furnace was making strange odors. The kind that make you think somebody's set up a foundry in your basement, that odd, half burned smell.

The night before last I dreamed I was sleeping in a metal foundry, inhaling fumes and metal dust. A disturbing dream, filled with refugees and orphans and old sweethearts. I kept thinking, where are these strange dreams about toxic emissions and odors coming from?

Yesterday I decided things really smelled wrong when I turned up the heat. I called a nice guy from a HVAC joint to come check our furnace.
It's dead. He took off the front panel, spent five minites poking it, and said he wouldn't even turn it back on. I belive him, too. It's an old oil burner converted to a gas burner, and almost as old as I am.
So Monday we're having a new furnace put in. And it's going to cost us four grand. Ouch.

But it's better than dying of carbon monoxide poisioning. But damn, it's going to get cold in here. And I think I understand why I had dreams of unburnt carbon and of old sweethearts. It was toxic gasses!

1 comment:

Pilot said...

Bad luck with fire this winter, eh?

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Ralph Waldo Emerson