Just for the record, today is the first day of October, 2009.

I have put the heat on in our house for the first time this morning.

I wanted to see how long we could go in the year before we turned the heat on, but, alas, my hands are just too cold for comfortable typing, and since typing is my job, cold hands are not a good thing. Actually, my back is cold, too, which was the final deciding factor to my turning on the heat for the first time today.

Back in 2005, on a morning similar to this, I turned the heat on and noticed smoke pouring out of the air vent in the living room! When I ran into the basement to see what was the matter, the oil burner was on fire! I ran back upstairs, hustled the two dogs outside to their back yard (and not without some estimable trouble, I might add), called the fire brigade and, for the most part, panicked. I was shaking all over by the time the firefighters arrived. Meanwhile, I had shut off the Emergency Switch for the furnace, which I had never touched since we moved into this house back in 1987. The firemen said that was the right thing to do. The fire seemed to die down, but smoke had filled the house. The oil burner was a goner.

Of course, husband was out lobstering and didn't return until all the commotion had died down, the trucks and men had all gone home, and I was back to my work routine once again, albeit very shaky.

We had to replace the oil burner that year, so this one is only 4 years old. It's much better than the old one, which was old when we bought the house in 1986.

The lesson to this story is to make sure you put the dogs out in their yard BEFORE starting up the heat for the first time in the season. That way all you have to get out of the house is yourself, if things should go terribly wrong.

So we have heat on October 1st. I couldn't hold out any longer. It's going to be a long winter here in the Northeast.

Cheers,

Bex