Timing is everything (or not)

Yesterday the upstairs heater broke, the main one for our living quarters. It didn't break in the usual way of quitting, mind you. It broke by deciding that it wouldn't turn off. I got home and walked in the door of the apartment, blinked a few times in confusion at the unusually warm air, and then started walking around sniffing for smoke and mentally running down the checklist for what to do in the event of a fire.

But there wasn't any smoke, and the problem was definitely the heater and only the heater.

This is a built-in baseboard heater; there is no plug to pull. It is old and hard to manage in any case, especially since we live in a building with essentially no insulation. (It's an old building. Decades ago around here, I guess insulation was seen as either for sissies or else as some variety of showing off.) No matter how you set this heater, with the least change in the weather you have to reset it. But usually you can at least turn it off by turning the knob all the way in one direction.

I tried every trick I've ever learned with this heater. No go. I admitted defeat and called my husband, who dropped what he was doing and came to my rescue. He began trying every trick he knew with this heater.

The cats began to be too much help, so I pulled out a bag of cat toys we had, as it happened, bought earlier in the day. I tossed a toy into the middle of the room to distract them. Just as our braver cat got to the brand-new toy, my husband quite coincidentally gave the heater a good, hard whack. The cat exploded down the hall. For the rest of the day, I might add, she gave that toy a wide berth and wary looks, apparently convinced it was that little foam football-like thing that made that horrendous sudden noise.

All the usual tricks failing us, and recent weather leaning toward summer anyway, my husband trekked to the two downstairs breaker boxes. For reasons that are unclear to us, there are three breaker boxes in this building, and the main ones for up here are down there, while one in the upstairs back is for somewhere else. Go figure. The people who wired this place were, ehm, creative. Having dealt with oddly laid out circuits in this building before, I went around turning off things that might be damaged by having the power jerked away - and then my husband flipped the switch marked for the heater.

It didn't make an iota of difference, at least not as far as the heater was concerned. We tried one circuit breaker after another - relaying information as needed over the phone - until we found one that made the heater begin to click with cooling. Having found the one that turned the heater off, I now got to go around and see if anything vital was also now without power. We have circuits, you understand, that include individual outlets or overhead lights in three rooms, but not all the outlets in any one of those three rooms. There is simply no way to know what is tied together, not really.

We seemed to get lucky this time. Only the heater seemed to be off. So we left it off.

Today I tried to introduce the accidentally betrayed cat to the new toy under better circumstances. I did a good wind-up and made encouraging sounds and tossed it across the bedroom in the sort of arc she especially likes to run after. She happily made a mighty run and a mighty leap across and over the bed in pursuit. I kid you not, the toy landed near the phone and just as she reached it the phone rang. The cat exploded down the hall again. This afternoon I found her sleeping somewhere she never sleeps. This was puzzling, until I realized that she had positioned herself well away from that toy, but where she had it directly in her sights every time she opened her eyes. She also, quite deliberately I'm sure, had assumed the high ground, being up on furniture while the toy rested on the floor. That toy, I assume, is not to be trusted after what it's done to her already. At the moment, that cat has come into this room and is napping with her back to me. I'm not, it appears, entirely in her good graces. She'll get over it.

Today, on the mountain just out of town, it is snowing. We need the snow. The snow pack has been looking like the end of June and not the beginning of it. But the breeze that is working its way through town has that sharp edge that comes from wending its way through snow only a few miles off. Of course it is snowing. Having decisively turned off our heater until we have time to mess with it, of course we will unexpectedly need heat.

You can't live in a building like this and not learn to be adaptable. We have a milk house heater, or space heater some people call it, up here already, because in really cold weather the baseboard can't handle the job by itself anyway. For this weather, the milk house heater can handle things. No problem. But still - the very day after we lose our heater and it snows? This time of year? Is our timing good, or what?

P.S. I have a friend who likes to list wonderful smells. For her information, an early June breeze rolling down a mountain, mixing freshly-snow-scrubbed air, juniper and pine with flowers both wild and domestic, with just a hint of mown lawns, is just about as good as it gets.