Enough

This morning I was dragged from blissful warm sleep to dozy wakefulness by the smell of burning. Specifically the smell that arises when you turn my furnace on.

"Well," my 6 AM-muddled brain thought, "that must be the neighbor's furnace, because I haven't yet turned my heat on. I'm smelling that through the wall."

Thus comforted, I closed my eyes again and tried to go back to sleep.

The smell only worsened though, and it was too strong to be coming through the wall, and as I lay there I wondered if it were possible that my heat had TURNED ITSELF ON. Had my house gotten so cold that the furnace had decided to rebel and start without me?

My furnace is never really OFF, it's just a matter of pushing the thermostat down as far as it will go in the spring. Once I turn off the heat, the house never gets cold enough to trigger it again.

Until this morning. When it got down somewhere in the low 50s, and my house had had enough.

It's still amazing to me how warm I can be in my bed compared to the temperature in the rest of the house. Granted, I'm wearing many clothes, and I'm buried under a down comforter and a quilt. But this morning, until I had to get up, I was perfectly comfortable in my cocoon. Trouble is, it's just so hard to leave.