I live in a duplex, rented, which has no bathroom fan. This is relevant to this story, because it explains why my bathroom is nearly always somewhat damp. Another relevant fact about my bathroom is this: whoever installed the towel racks these many years ago, measured just a little bit badly, and put up the two ends about 1/8" too far apart. This means the crossbar can and does fall out any time it becomes misaligned in the smallest degree.
So, in the winter, I don't always shave. It all depends on how much time I have. When I have time, or when I get tired of hairy, I do. I'm pretty sure lots of women share this approach, although I admit I have never attempted to gather any data. To decide whether I have time or not after I'm done with critical showering activities such as shampooing, I typically look out of the shower at the clock. It's a clock-radio on top of the toilet. In our rather linear bathroom, the toilet is furthest from the tub.
When I look out at the clock, I often put my hand on the wall. On Sunday, something went horribly, horribly wrong. There was a box of kleenex in the way, on the edge of the counter, so I leaned a little further out of the tub, hand on the wall. Those of you who:
can probably guess what happened next. My wet hand and the steamy/damp wall, together, well, there was not enough friction there to support my lean. On down I went. I momentarily thought perhaps I could stop myself with the towel rack, but no, it became misaligned by rather more than the smallest degree when most of my weight hit it (and it also bent quite nicely at one end).
Objects fall at roughly thirty-two feet per second, per second. Right? Well, I wasn't falling flat-out, as I did have some wall support kinda, and also the edge of the tub, but I also am not 32 feet tall, so it was roughly half a second till I hit the floor. It's amazing how long half a second feels when you are falling flat on your face. This process goes something like this:
Oh dear, I am falling.
Maybe I can catch myself. [snag towel rack]
Blast! That didn't work. [towel rack now following hand to floor]
I'm still falling.
There go my feet out from under me.
I bet that's because the fronts of my thighs just hit the edge of the tub. Legs don't bend that way.
On the bright side, my legs in fact didn't bend that way or try.
Still falling.
Hands out in attempt to catch self
Failure to catch self. Still falling
Ouch.
So here I am, dripping wet, tangled up in the shower curtain (minor miracle: curtain rod did not follow me to the floor), feet up in the air, doing some sort of kamikaze upside-down backbend in which I am face down on the floor, mid-thigh-front up on the edge of the tub.
Have I ever told you about my hair phobia? I really, really hate having hair fall out of my head and stay on me, especially wet hair. I cannot be the person in charge of cleaning hair out of the drain since this would mean every time the drain got full of hair, we would just move. I am aware this is weird, but phobias are like that, and since my day isn't usually all that impacted by this, I've never cared to pay someone to cure me. Now, those of you who know my by sight may be aware I have roughly two feet of hair currently attached to my head. In order to minimize the number of times some of it abandons it moorings and sticks to me in the shower, I vigorously comb in all out before showering, so any loose pieces are already gone. This, however, means my bathroom floor requires very frequent sweeping up of the alarming amount of hair I shed. You might guess the point of this digression is that there was a lot of it on the floor when I hit it with my wet face. There are no words in English to explain how bad this was, or what it took for me to drag myself up off the floor (bad rotator cuff notwithstanding) and stave off a panic attack long enough to get most of it off me. Um, I'm getting that metallic taste in my mouth and feeling somewhat ill just writing about it.
And then I put my bruised and stars-seeing self back in the shower to get cleaned back up. And I thought that was the end.
Now, that was on Sunday. Sunday December 16.
And then Tuesday happened: I was driving along minding my own business in my new car (it's new to me, bought in October, with only 30K miles on it). I was heading west on sixth, just a couple blocks before the turnoff onto 105/126, when we all stopped for a light. "We all," of course, doesn't include the driver behind me. She did stop, actually, but it was shortly after her car started touching mine. Fortunately, all it did was touch, and then stop. It sounded horrible, and felt pretty alarming, but the cars weren't damaged. We pulled over and looked at her front end and my back end pretty carefully, eventually found a nick approximately the size of a ladybug in the bottom of the back bumper, and decided neither one of us wanted to discuss this situation with any insurance agents. She was appropriately horrified and feeling very lucky.
But I still wasn't really thinking anything weird about my week. Just a coincidence.
And then it was Thursday. Notice this is now coming up on the weekend before Christmas, and I was leaving in 2 days for the family holiday thing.
Along about 9pm on Thursday I smelled this faint burning smell. Not much at all, just a wisp. I went all over the house trying to locate what was making that smell, and coming up with nothing. Nothing in the kitchen, no appliances, nothing plugged in anywhere smelling funny...eventually the smell dispersed and I concluded it must just have been either my imagination or an externally-imposed smell from somewhere else. I quit worrying about it, and in fact, around 11, I went to bed.
Pete goes and watches pro wrestling with his friends on Thursdays. It's not really my thing, so it's just as well it happens not-in-my-house. He got home around a quarter to 12. I was still mostly-awake ("go to bed" for me, means, get in bed with a book and read until sleep comes, which is often an hour or more). I heard him go in the bathroom, and a sort of startled grumbling sound, then a snap-pop, then a holler. Followed by a more coherent holler, for help. Turns out, he had gone in the bathroom, been startled to find the heat obviously on (very warm in the room), assumed one of the kids had turned it up, which we just never do in there, reached to turn it down, gotten shocked by the ancient metal thermostat, and looky, smoke and small flames inside the thermostat! Yikes!
So, he went to move stuff in the basement to turn off the appropriate power supply while I called 911. I explained to the 911 operator that given it was not billowing smoke nor openly flaming, we'd stay put and call back if the situation worsened--I didn't very badly want to drag my kids out of bed and such. However, I did want a fireman to come have a look and make it stop smoking.
They sent an entire fire truck with three guys. First they couldn't find my house (the house number is present and appropriately-colored, but is up on the overhang which makes it not so visible when the front light (under the overhang) is on). They did find us after about 15 minutes, which was fine since it gave me an opportunity to put on clothes. Nothing had gotten worse in the interim; in fact, I could no longer see the funny flickery flames inside the thermostat (smoke still thinly trickling up the wall, though).
The firemen came in and looked at the thermostat and affirmed that indeed it was on fire. They also agreed that so far the wall wasn't on fire, and thought that they should have a look inside.
I should say at this point that I had been talking to the 911 lady and getting dressed, so I had not been involved in fuse management. The lights to the whole back end of the house were out, and Pete had flipped the switch that indicated bathroom heat. The firemen went to pry loose the thermostat cover. Recall I said above that the thermostat is metal. They used a screwdriver. They sent sparks shooting across the room. They all three jumped real high and expressed dismay, one of them in language not appropriate for children. They decided there was still a live flow of power to the thermostat. They went out into the garage to give it another try, turned off the power, pried again, sparked again, jumped again. Back to the garage. This time they turned off every switch (this would have been my Plan A, but I wasn't consulted). They finally succeeded in prying off the cover, although now with three bursts of power shooting through it and given its general ancientness, probably one more jolt would have disintegrated it anyway; it looked pretty sad, blackened and crumbly, by this point. They looked at the smoldering wires in the wall and determined the wiring was on fire. This sort of reminded me of the time the mechanic looked at my possessed car with the various knobs working different functions than intended (e.g., radio knob turning on headlights), and notified me he suspected there was something wrong with the electrical system. Anyway, they decided the wall itself was NOT on fire (whew), so they separated all the wires, taped 'em all up real good, turned the power back on, waited a few minutes to be sure nothing else bad happened, admonished us again about the house number, told us we should definitely get an electrician in to fix this (duh!), and left.
Fifteen minutes later we realized the hole in this strategy. The power to the heat in the bathroom was back on; however, there was no working thermostat to tell it to stop producing heat. Oops. So, we had to turn the heat back off (we turned off all heat breakers for good measure) and wait a while to make sure it was truly off. Needless to say, I did not get to work at 8:00 Friday morning.
So here's the question. Three really alarming things all of which could have been a lot worse, all in one week. Do you suppose it was bad luck, or good luck? I mean, no broken bones or sprains in the fall; no damage in the accident, and no serious fire in the thermostat incident. Just bruises, a nick, and a trickle of smoke and some sparks. What do you think?