What is burning?

I'm sitting here reading blogs when I smell something burning. Well, actually, the smell is the smell of something heating up, like an iron or a heater you haven't had on in a while - that sort of dusty hot smell. I immediately hop up to find the source of this smell. My nose takes me to the master bedroom. Yep, definitely something in here. I figured the small space heater had come on since all the windows and the sliding glass door are open, the fan is going, making it about 62 degrees in there. So, I check the heater, which is usually set to come on when the temp gets below 65. Nope, it's not going, hasn't been going, and can't go because it's turned off completely. I check my curling iron "just in case", since it has not been on yet this AM and has an auto-shutoff that would have turned it off if I'd forgotten to do so yesterday. Nope, not that. I sniff all over the room and can't find the source for the life of me. I sniff like a beagle all over the house and out the windows. It is definitely coming from the master bedroom. Since I can't find any offending appliance, I chalk it up to a lingering smell from Tom's earlier use of the hair dryer - plausible but not likely.

I returned to my laptop in the living room and continued to peruse blogs and comments. After about 20 minutes, the smell got stronger. Now I was worried. What if some wires in the wall were overheating (you always hear about fires starting from wiring). I had to find the source. I returned with vigor to the master bedroom, my nose twitching like Samantha's in Bewitched. I sniffed around everything electrical - the TV, the satellite receiver, the surge strip they are plugged into, to no avail. The smell was strongest by the bed so I double-checked the electric blanket. Not on. I was starting to really freak out, touching the walls to see if they were warm or "different". The closer I got to our headboard, the stronger the smell became. Suddenly, I realized what it was! Our bed is a waterbed with a regular mattress in the frame instead of a waterbed mattress so the headboard sits on the frame above the floor (you know what I mean). I reached under the headboard and felt the wave of heat arising from......the baseboard heater! Its breaker was supposed to be turned off to eliminate this exact thing from happening, but apparently it had gotten turned back on somehow. The thermostat in the room was turned to "off", which really means 50 degrees, so it was a lot colder in our room than I thought, but that heater should not have been on. I immediately ran to shut the breaker off. Lord knows what is sitting on that heater under the headboard that could have caught fire! Phew! Thank you, Lord, for giving me a good nose, letting me be home to smell this disaster-in-waiting, and saving our house from burning down.

We actually removed the heaters in four places in the house because we don't use them. Back when we built this house we had a woodburning stove for heat. The bank actually required us to have baseboard heaters as backup before they'd lend us the money, so we put them in. On rare occasions we did use them to supplement the wood heat. Many moons ago, when natural gas became available in our neighborhood, we swapped the wood stove for a gas free-standing stove. (Yay! No more chopping wood, carrying wood in each night, soot, etc.) It is our sole source of heat now, with the exception of the small electric ceramic heater in our bedroom. Our bedroom is on the north side of the house so, when the north wind blows in the winter, it gets cold in there as the heat seems to all get pushed to the south end of the house. The heater comes on if the temperature drops below 65, which is not that often. It's a lot more economical than the baseboard heater and does exactly what we had hoped it would do.

I sit on my sofa blogging in the early AM. About 5 feet from me is our 45 gallon aquarium. After once being populated with 40 fish, we are down to 4. I thought I was a bad fish owner, though in years past I have had aquariums and have had dozens of fish thrive. When one of the gouramis died, I finally figured out what was going on. We had two opaline gouramis. I had always had gouramis and loved them, loved watching them swim around, "touching" things with their little "tentacles". Well, this pair stayed hidden behind one of the big rocks in the tank pretty much 24/7. They were boring! When the one gourami died, it was following an injury to its side, I realized the culprit was the other gourami. Turns out, despite his sheepish behavior, he is very aggressive, especially at night. He attacked all the other fish in the tank, causing injuries and eventual death. So, now he's alone with two cory catfish and a giant gold plecostomus. The plecostomus is too big for him to take on and the cory cats are too fast and probably mean. So now he's alone and probably bored out of his mind. How do I know he's bored? Every morning as I sit here blogging or reading, he suddenly goes completely insane and races around the tank, banging into the sides, swimming in dozens of circles, jumping to the surface over and over, making such a racket the cat comes racing in to see what's going on, and then just as suddenly, he stops and goes back behind the rock. He's crazy. I think I'm going to trade him and the plecostomus in for a bunch of small, nice fish, like some neons and some tetras. No more gouramis.

Time to get ready for work.