Do you smell something burning?

If they say you can't overload a socket, then why do they sell the adapters that do just that? My outlet looks like this. Well, not this bad, but close. Back in 1984 my sister and I were putting plastic on the windows at my Mom's house. She threw a piece of pressed plywood into the fireplace. It wasn't long before we realized what a mistake that was.

The fire department came. Luckily for us, the only result was we got our chimney cleaned out real good with that fire. It never went beyond the fireplace. They had to plug an exhaust fan in, and the outlet did look like the above picture. They just shook their heads at us. You could see the smoke for almost a mile. The cars had to stop on the road in front of the house because they couldn't see, the smoke was that black and thick.

I think my sister was just thinking it was a piece of wood. Pressed plywood is like dozens of layers of wood pressed together. It was a rather exciting day for a cloudy, cold and gray November. The year before our furnace had quit. My brother-in-law got it running for us (my Mom and I) and sometime during the night it stopped again. An oil furnace. The temperature was 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero with a windchill factor of minus 60.

Since it had been cold in the house all day, I drank a lot of hot tea to help keep me warm. We all huddled around the fire place. The guys had a space heater in the basement for where they were working. So, about 3:00 a.m., I had to pee really bad because of all the hot tea I drank. We had left a trickle of water running in the bathtub. I was freezing and trying to hurry. I squinted in the bright light and looked at the bath tub. A frozen solid icicle connected the faucet to the floor of the tub. "Great," I thought. Pipes froze again.

I had a water bottle in my bed room for my freshly permed hair. I shook the bottle. A little crackling. Frozen, but not solid. I huddled under the blankets holding my little dandie terrier close to me so she wouldn't freeze to death. About 6 a.m., my sister came to get us and made us go to her house. The same year, I pulled the thermometer out of the refrigerator and put it on the kitchen sink. At one time it read 8 degrees Fahrenheit. We would joke, "It was so cold, we had to open up the refrigerator to keep warm."

At the time, it wasn't funny. I felt abandoned and betrayed by my brothers and sisters. I resolved during those long nights to never need or depend on them ever again. I so did not want to go here with this blog. This is not what I was meaning to write about at all, but I will leave it.