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After my TiVo orientation session ended at about 2 A.M., it was time to go to sleep. I walked upstairs and through the kitchen when I was hit with a wave of cold. Ya remember in the movie The Sixth Sense when everything would turn cold just before a ghost would appear? You could see their breath blow as a wave of cold came upon them? Well, that's what it felt like to me. I thought "hmmm, it's really cold tonight" and went to bed.
I half-woke this morning at about 6:30 A.M. You know that kind of wakefulness that really has no ability to fend off your efforts to go back to sleep. It's as if your consciousness just wants to pop its head up to see if the world is still there and maybe pull the covers up before surrendering to the gentle call of sleep again. During this reality check, my right arm was outside the covers and I pulled it in under the blankets. My consciousness said "Whoa! That arm is really cold against your body! The rest of my body said "Shut up and go back to sleep!" Well, my mind won out as it wouldn't let me go back to sleep. It kept nagging me that there was something significant about that cold arm. It was really cold. It wasn't warming up quickly at all. It was like when you go camping and you're really snug when you go to sleep (possibly 'cause you're drunk from all the beers you drank around the campfire) but then when you wake up with a rock in your back and you're freezing cold - your body parts feel as if you pulled them out of a cooler. And speaking of coolers, are there any more beers in there? Oh. wait... where was I?
I gave in to my bastard consciousness and kicked off the covers. Damn! it was cold in here. Let's look at the old thermostat, shall we? Hmmm, 51 degrees. My, that is cold. My clock works. The T.V. works. So the power must be on. Damn, our heat is out. My first thought was how much was it going to cost to get a guy come out to the house on New Year's Day morning. I went downstairs and woke everyone else up. If I have to be miserable, I'm not going to do it alone. Actually, I woke everyone up so I could make sure that I didn't have two frozen kid-sicles or a beautiful wife-sicle on my hands. But no, everyone was alive and bundled under their respective blankets.
Off I go down to the basement to check the heater. We have a gas burner heater and a separate gas water heater. The water heater was working just fine. That means we could spend the rest of the day in the shower staying warm. We just couldn't step out to get dry or we'd be instantly flash-frozen and body parts would start snapping off. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to have body parts snap off, I don't want to be naked at the time. I'll lose a couple of fingers any day before risking anything more (ahem) vital. I take the cover off the bottom of the heater and see no pilot light. Must have blown out during the cold, windy night (even though there are no drafts in that basement). OK, I'll just light that right up. There was even a helpful little sticker on the inside of the cover telling me how to relight the pilot. "Turn the knob to PILOT, press down, light with match still pressing knob. After minute, release knob and turn knob to ON." Sounded incredibly simple. And it was, except for that part between "release knob" and "turn knob to ON". 'Cause the pilot kept going out just then. Which meant something else was wrong. I called PSE&G, the gas company, to see what could be done. An automated system offered me a repair appointment of between 8 AM and 12 noon on 1/2/2002. Hmmm. I think we can do better than that. I grabbed the phone book, looked under "HEATING" and started calling every ad that had the words "emergency" and "24 hours". No one answered. On the 7th (!) try, I reached a company called Foremost Heating. A cheery voice took all my info and told me that she would page them immediately. That was at 8:56 A.M.
Now I don't know what to do with myself. I figured I check out the Internet for info on this particular brand of heater and on gas pilot lights in general. The net has been there for me before, it might have the information I seek. I got upstairs and clicked my browser icon. "The page cannot be displayed". WTF? I tried typing in Google's address directly. "The page cannot be displayed" Ack! My internet connection isn't working?!?! But... but... well, FINE then. I'm going back downstairs to try and relight the pilot light. Perhaps I didn't hold down the knob long enough before to allow the gas to flow or the sensor to heat or something. I've got to try something so I don't have to pay a fortune to get this thing fixed on New Year's Day. I'm sitting on a cold, concrete floor, - hunched over trying to stick a tiny wooden match into the pilot light - when there is a loud boom and everything goes dark.
No, Claudine didn't smack me on the back of the head with a frying pan for waking her up. The power went out! The effing power went out! Its the Y2K(+2) bug finally coming true! I lost my heat, my Internet, my power all in the first nine hours of 2002! AAAAAAAHHHHHH! Grabs the gun honey, whilst I collects the chilluns and prepares the root cellar! Jake and Bobby are like "This is what New Year's means? You can have it!" Actually, the power trucks were out in the neighborhood in about 20 minutes and had it fixed in about 40 minutes. So that wasn't too bad. During that time, while I had time to stew, I went down and looked at the whole pilot light assembly. Besides the actual line that carries gas into the burner, there was a wacky copper tube that started from the knob assembly and ended with its tip right in the flame of the pilot light. Something clicked in my head and I called my dad because I seem to remember something similar happening while I still lived at home. He told me the device (the copper tube thingy) was called a thermocouple and that they can wear out in anywhere from 3 to 10 years. He told me he had to order one from a heating specialist who catered to selling supplies to contractors. Well, I have a Home Depot right in town. I'm gonna give them a call. My Dad did not think that anything would be open on New Year's Day. Dad, it's Home Depot. It's always open. Sure enough, I called them up and a cheery voice answered. I was elated. "Do you have replacement parts for gas heaters and burners?" I asked. "No, we don't carry those" I was deflated. "So you wouldn't have a thermocouple for a gas heater?" "Oh, thermocouples? Yeah, we have those." Duh. I was elated. Off I went to Home Depot. It was packed! I couldn't believe how many people were there. I could some customers getting emergency stuff, but some guys were buying lumber and building supplies. At 9:30 in the morning on New Year's Day. Go back to bed will ya? Anyway I went straight to front desk and they pointed me to the "thermocouple" aisle. I grabbed one and went to pay. In the checkout line ahead of me was a guy buying three large space heaters. He was complaining to the cashier about waking up to the New Year with no heat in his house. Dude, just call your dad. Dad knows. Paid $5.80 and drove home. Used a single adjustable wrench to connect the part to the heater. Used my second-to-last match in the house to light the pilot. Whoooshh! That burner lit in an instant. We had heat. Life was good.
After waiting till 11:30 A.M., I called Foremost Heating back and said that they didn't have to call me back. They guy on the phone asked my name and then asked what happened. I said "I fixed it!".
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