Curiosity got the better of me today. My little house has a tendency to like extremes. The wood that comprises the majority of walls can trap heat, and then turn around and trap the arctic winds. It's been doing the latter lately, which means that as the temperature outside dips to the high 30's and low 40's at night, my house likes to follow suit, which means that I wake up only to find that the temperature in my house is 50 degrees. I caved last week and turned on the heater, but only run it for about an hour at a time if it gets that cold inside. The bathroom is another story. Despite being mere feet away from the heater, it doesn't benefit one iota from the heater's warmth.

Which lead me to my ether-smelling Curious George incident of the day. There's this metal grate on the wall of the bathroom that I've long suspected is a heater. I could practically see my breath in there, so I decided to flip the switch on the little heater, something I've been dying to do pretty much since the day I moved in here. Smoke started pouring out the top within two seconds, naturally, so I immediately turned the switch off.

It's like some Pandora's Box of heaters, it turns out, and once those coils turned orange they never turned back to. The heat was fantastic for all of ten seconds, at which point it suddenly turned into a sauna and I started sweating and my back suddenly flared up, the unfortunate result of a previous bout with heat rash from four years ago.

I've since made several attempts to turn the hateful thing off, but even when the switch is off, it mocks me with its hot orange coils, not unlike the evil furnace in Home Alone.

You'd think this would teach me not to play with the old things that make up my humble abode, but it won't. But I'm thinking I want both heaters off and I'm going to take Maxie's advice and get myself a space heater. Electricity is so much easier than this gas business. All it took was one night and I already feel differently about a cold toilet seat. Weird how that worked.