Retrospect
November 17th, 2005
No trip to town necessary for another week now. We had made it home with the supplies the day before but in a way which could become a tauntingly repetitive theme for every trip to come thereafter - we didn't beat the setting sun. Luckily, the pitch black didn't fall on us until we were closer to the more recognizable last 10 miles. We now also remembered that the sun took any hint of comfortable heat with it and we unpacked the truck with record efficiency. The first objective was to unpack the small propane blast furnace which we found at the big box DIY store. It cautionned "Not for residential use" but we were desperate. We had a choice of freezing to death or breathing a bit of CO. We chose the latter since living in the rat trailer was roughly equivalent to standing in a wind tunnel. The air exchange rate must have been impressive. We would not leave it on during the night but use it to pump up the temperature just before bedtime and just have to hope that the heat would keep us above freezing level until morning. Maybe not ideal but a great improvement over the night before.
We had dragged home three of their 10 pound tanks to fuel it, too - the small barbeque kind that they lock up in cages outside the store. The unit fired up and radiated a joyous heat. I slumped down into a hard chair and gazed into the center of the heater housing, beyond the roaring flame, to the other side. The embossed warning there sent the comforting dyslectic message "!toH" Yes! toH, toH, toH and those Hot waves were beginning to reach my shivering torso. The cats were soon rolling around and grinning like laughing Buddhas. This might have been their first real indulgent pleasure since we curtailed their old roaming 'at large' habits over a month ago. They had become grim and joyless in the interim. We had been amply warned that coyotes would snatch up an errant cat in short order so we were now constantly guarding the door lest they slip out. I knew that I could not handle another loss of a beloved pet friend during this trying adaptation period. As much as the loss of a small friend, it was dealing with Mark's quiet but grinding, sigh-filled suffering and knowing that I could do nothing to ease his sorrow.
The reverie in this new heat was interrupted abruptly. I noticed Mark making my same bunny nose twitches just as I said "Gee, do you smell something? Kinda like a burning smell or something?" I forget which one of us was first to dive towards the heater's off switch but I remember shoving the heater back with my foot. Beneath the heater lay a still sizzling patch of kitchen floor tile that used to imitate marble. Nowhere in the instructions did we notice a warning that this unit would sear the snot out of anything less stalwart than the deck of the Queen Mary. Oh joy. After a few moments of brain storming, we dragged in 4 solid core concrete blocks and stacked them pedestal style over the newly brindled faux marble. This quick fix would see us through the winter without further melt downs. The incident also molded our direction in terms of how to eventually update the rat trailer flooring in practical and much safer ways. More on that to follow as the rat rehab begins.
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