I'm a bargain basement blogger. My PC sits on a nifty ergonomic desk, although the computer is unusable for the moment and awaiting the ministrations of the geek. Meantime, I hunch over my laptop that takes up most of the top of the card table it's on because I've attached a keyboard. (The fantastically comfortable Wave keyboard I blogged about before. It's so awesome my fingernail ridges flatten out every time they get near it.) This is all in the former family room, next to the laundry room that is at one end of the furnace room, next to my son's weight room. Sounds a lot more palatial than it is, believe me.
The decor is Rambling Rural Rustic, which means mousetraps and Gazelle exercise machines coordinate well as accessories and the color scheme is off-white as in "patches of white are peeling off the walls and half the ceiling is white-ish and half is wallboard gray." (Daughter calls it "off-color" instead of "off-white", which may be more accurate.) The view, however, is gorgeous. If I look to my left, I can see a beautiful field with snow falling on pine trees and old, gnarled, apple trees. (Did you notice that the date on this is March 28th? And still with the snow!) Of course, if I keep looking to my left, I can type gibberish for ten minutes and not know it, so I don't admire the view very often.
It was a few days ago that I sensed that I wasn't alone in the basement. I didn't see anyone, but I could hear them singing or humming in a high-pitched voice. At first, I thought it was a radio, TV or computer being used by Son or Daughter. But when I checked, they were playing a game of Uno in the dining room and arguing loudly, not singing or humming.
When I returned to the basement, everything was quiet, so I chalked up the whole thing to a vagrant wind gust and got back to work. Fifteen minutes later, the dadblamed ghostly chorus started up again. It was very faint, but I have excellent hearing, and I could almost make out the words the tinny little voice was singing. It seemed to change frequently, almost as if someone was turning the dial on a radio and switching stations. One minute, the words sounded liltingly Celtic, the next they had more of a French accent and then all of a sudden it was the Tuvan throat singing that Geekdaddy is so fond of, and I liken to gargling with razor blades - through your nose.
It was driving me mad, so I got up and moved around the basement, trying to track it down. As I approached the laundry room, it got louder, and then faded, but picked up again when I turned toward the furnace. I tried to remember if the legendary Phoenixes were fond of singing, but I'm a little shaky on the whole mythical beast pantheon, although I couldn't think of anything else that could survive long enough to sing in a furnace, and that was definitely where the singing was coming from.
I'd heard of people picking up radio stations on their fillings, and I know you can get some fascinating airwave reception on one of those tinfoil hats if you put an antenna on it, but I'd never heard of anyone receiving Clear Channel or whatever it was on their oil furnace. Until now, of course, that is. I leaned down and gave the heater a long scrutiny and listened intently.
I finally tracked it down. It came from a valve on top of the water tank, and it was a little humming noise, high-pitched and varying enough to make it sound like distant singing. Why my furnace sings is a mystery. The furnace repair folk I called said it's perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. They said almost no one noticed it or knew that their furnace did it. Does yours? If so, drop me a line, will you? I'd like to know that I don't have the only singing heating appliance in the US. (Although if I have, maybe we could sell it on eBay, ya' think?)
Now to the "seeing things" part of this post, which occurred very early this morning when Geekdaddy hit the bathroom. It was before the alarm went off and still very dark, so as usual, he used the bluish glow of his watch to light his way. On his way back to bed, his finger slipped off the watch button, so he was mystified when the glow continued. The odd thing was, though that now the light was coming from the bathtub drain, and it was orange rather than blue.
Regular readers of my writing can tell you that the geek is pretty oblivious and also pretty impervious to weird situations, but this was a bit much even for him. What got the' pens jumping in his pajama pocket protector was the way the glow seemed to go all the way down the drain as far as he could see - which led him to wonder if it wasn't some kind of bacterial reaction going on all the way back to the septic tank.
"I think we'd better pour some bleach down the drain," he said after he'd told me about it at breakfast, "Maybe using all this natural stuff isn't such a hot idea. I think there's something ALIVE down there!"
Son agreed, and Daughter was looking pretty apprehensive about taking her nightly bath with glowing tub fixtures, but I was skeptical. So, after Geekdaddy left, the kids and I went into the bathroom, shut the door and looked down into the drain. The only window is covered by dark blue drapes because it looks out on the mudroom, so it was pretty dark in there. Well, except for the eerie orange glow coming out of the tub drain. The geek hadn't exaggerated. It was really weird.
I confess that I was stumped, but only for about a minute. Then I realized that the tub drain, which used to have a perforated metal cover over it until I removed it so that I could clean it more thoroughly, is made of opaque white plastic. Under our bathroom is the laundry room, where Daughter had gone just before bed the night before to retrieve some clothes. I suspected that she had left the light on, and that's what was making the drain glow. When Son went to check, the light was on. When he shut it off, the light disappeared.
I reached for my phone to call the geek, but then I decided to wait and let him see that there's no glow there anymore, turn the light on and see if he can figure it out. The kids want to tell him that we didn't see a glow, but I think that would be mean. Funny, but mean.
The Groucho crouch? Well, that's what we have to do so as not to disconnect my wireless connection. Geekdaddy set it up with the receiver as high up as he could, but when anyone walks up or down the stairs from the basement, including me, it evidently cuts off the connection because I have to click on the wi-fi icon and repair it. So I kind of crouch when I walk upstairs and I yell at everyone else to "crouch like Groucho!" when they open the basement door at the top of the stairs. (I did it to the furnace guy because I thought he was one of the kids when Son let him in to clean the furnace. Goodness knows what he thought.)
So, that's the lowdown on the singing furnace, the glowing drain and why we have to walk like one of the Marx brothers whenever I'm on the Net. Those aren't the strangest things that happened in our neck of the woods this week, but they're interesting. However, I haven't touched on the most interesting thing. That was the guy in the library telling one of the librarians about an alien invasion that he witnessed some time ago.
She was calmly saying things like, "Really? I didn't know that" and "Well, isn't that interesting" and "How true. You can never tell with aliens" and he was going on and on. At first, I thought he was telling her about a book he'd read, but as the story unfurled, it was obvious that he was talking about something that he'd actually witnessed, although possibly only in the private screening room in his mind. Maybe the librarians are good at these kinds of conversations partly because this is the library where Stephen King has a library card, and they've read all his books, so the definition of weird has been stretched already.
But who am I to talk? After all, I'm the woman crouching on the stairs in the house with the singing furnace and the glowing drain and mousetraps - albeit humane ones that don't kill the mice - for office accessories in the room with the off-color walls.