The Gas Situation

It was rainy and glum yesterday, and that made me happy.

I was looking forward to a cozy night at home with the kitties, recuperating from my trip back east and getting rotisserie chicken at the farmer’s market, and then curling up in my sleeping bag and watching my last bootlegged episode of Game of Thrones on my big new Apple monitor. I was looking forward to it so much, in fact, that of course the universe decided to thwart the whole idea. Actually, PG&E decided to thwart it.

Some project they had embarked on in my front yard went awry and our gas got disconnected. I discovered this when I went to make tea for the 400th time and the stove wouldn’t light. I had a long, circuitous discussion with the PG&E repair dudes out front, and only by deductive reasoning was I able to ascertain that yes, in fact, they had accidently turned the gas off.

But don’t worry, they said; it will be back on in 5 hours or so. Grr. Without gas, I have no stove (which means no tea), no heat, and no hot water.

First world problem, I told myself.

Then I went out to dinner with Maynard and ordered enough food to feed a small Malaysian village.

When I got back, the PG&E truck was once again parked out front and they were fixing the gas. The tall, beady-eyed repairman, who I am pretty sure has a mild case of Asperger’s (sidenote — I sometimes think I myself have a mild case of Asperger’s, so I’m not judging, just saying) came into my cottage to relight the pilots on my stove, hot water heater, and — most importantly — my regular heater.

My heater is the thing that makes my apartment so wonderfully warm and toasty and cozy and charming and just all around sweet. It’s a faux fireplace that lights up with the flick of a switch and renders the entire cottage Bikram-yoga-warm in a matter of minutes, while throwing off an inviting, wholesome amber glow. It’s so efficient that I never leave it on for more than a few minutes and I often keep the windows cracked when it’s on. I do, however, use it year round, because the Bay Area in June can be a cold bitter winter. The heater was the main source of my panic attack around not having gas. I can live without showering and hot tea, but I can’t live in a chilly cottage when it’s raining for days on end.

Sadly, this is the point at which the dude informed me that my heater is totally against code and will probably poison me with carbon monoxide any minute now IF it doesn’t explode in a giant violent fireball. He said this with zero bedside manner, before giving me a lecture about how air works and quizzing me about whether I actually learned anything in high school science class (rhetorical question; I didn’t). He dramatically refused to light the pilot and backed away, muttering about the inane person who had sold us and then installed a lethal weapon in place of a heater.

Naturally, I googled “death by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.”

Now if they’re trying to make it sound scary, they are doing a really bad job. That’s A. I mean, on the list of ways to die, silently and painlessly in one’s sleep is preferable.

What’s B? B is that I got the pilot lit anyway and turned the heater back on. It’s been working for a year and a half and I haven’t asphyxiated yet. But I did plug in the carbon monoxide alarm that’s been languishing in my drawer since the last time it went off (when I told myself, “the thing must be on the fritz”).

Unfortunately, it did go off again in the middle of the night. And more unfortunately, I was so tired that I got up out of bed, unplugged it, and put it back in the drawer. The one thing I am more afraid of than death is not getting enough sleep.