The Furnace and the Wife

It was midday and frigid when the furnace went out. This tended to confirm my prejudice that our appliances are too complex and over-engineered and fail when they are most needed. I called the office of our heating man. The answering girl seemed almost afraid of my response when she told me they were overwhelmed with furnaces failing in the cold snap and could not get to me until sometime the next day. We would have to spend a night without gas heat. I reassured her that I understood and tomorrow would be fine.

As I hung up I realized I would be fine...until my wife came home at least. Afterall, we still had electricity. I put a sweater over my flannel shirt and a fleeced turtleneck sweat shirt over that. I put on three pairs of socks and a second pair of fleeced sweat pants. I was warm but still had freedom of movement. I lit a candle in the middle of the kitchen table, put a teapot of water on a low burner to shoot steam away from the cabinets and into the kitchen center and I decided to cook a pot of rice. This kept the kitchen at a fairly comfortable 50 degrees as I warmed my hands over the teapot steam or wrapped them around a mug of hot tea.

The problem my wife has with such life situations is that she suspects that I am secretly enjoying them as some sort of survivalist challenge. This is pure perversion to her. As she arrived home tired from work and physically under the weather, I was secretly ready to find a hotel room if she demanded but refrained from telling her this outright as I explained the situation and how lucky we were that the temperature was only going down into the twenties tonight and not near zero as it had the two previous nights. “Well I guess you’ll have something to blog about,” she dead panned.

After a supper of canned soup over rice and the last of her birthday cake we retired to our two living room recliners with a electric space heater between them and blankets over our torsos. We watched TV until eight then turned off the heater and retired to a bed of covers and blankets which we pulled up to our chins. I put a fleeced blanket by the headboard which we could pull down over our heads so that only our noses and mouths weren’t covered. We were warm but restless all night. Frequent trips to the bathroom made me wonder how the kids in Little House on the Prairie ever made it to their outhouse.

In the morning after a breakfast oatmeal and coffee, the space heater had managed to bring the bathroom temperature up to a balmy 55 degrees and my wife spent what seemed like an hour in a hot bath. Fortunately the repairman arrived around nine AM. He immediately did more for our marriage than any marriage counselor could have. The temperature is now up to 70 and we are back to what passes for normal around here.