Life Imitating Art, Again

My life might be imitating art again, only I'm not so sure. For one thing, the art that may be being copied is my next "novel," which hasn't even been written yet, and the liklihood of its being "art" is less than that of me winning the lottery. Still, I may be acting like one of my (future) characters.

Either that, or I'm incredibly brave or smart.

With winter coming on it's likely to get colder (that's not the smart part). What that means is that the old gas heater will be called into action again and will rattle and complain its way through another few months, this time burning up fuel that's going to be quite a bit pricier than last year.

This cannot be good for me.

As much as I enjoy hot weather, I'm comfortable when it's cold. I love slipping into cold sheets and warming them up, I love being in a cocoon of warmth in an otherwise cold room, and I like the feel of crisp breezes across my naked face. What I don't like so much is being colder than I like.

I've shunned little electrical heaters all my life because they smell funny. Also, it just seems wasteful to pay for perfectly good electricity just to create resist it to enjoy the side-benefit of the heat let off. This year, however, electricity will probably be cheaper than natural gas, so I'm planning on buying a few little heaters to supplement the labors of the laboring beast in the scary closet.

And here's what I did: I bought one heater and, without even glancing at the sixteen pages of detailed and multi-lingual instructions, plugged it in to see how it worked! Such hubris!

It turns out only seven of the pages are in English, but I amazed myself by figuring out the complex knobs. One had "off, fan" and two power settings (1300 or 1500W) and the other twisted from low to high.

It took some doing, sure, but I was able to get the little bastard to emit heat. I am just that good.

I'm sure there's some important information in all those pages of instructions, so if you don't hear back from me, I've died.