Today I... January 8th

Today I...

...am sharing this picture of a very affectionate sculpture in Old Montreal :o)

...ended up going out to dinner with V after all when her sister called her and told her that they were going to be having dinner with their mother at her sister's place next weekend instead of going all the way out to their mother's place. We had a nice chat and ate a TON of yummy sushi. She wants us to get together again in two weeks, so hopefully it will work out on the first try!!!

...woke up at noon, but before your guys find me incredibly lazy, allow me to explain the reason behind my late rising. I went to wash my dishes around 11:30 P.M. last night and found, upon nearing my kitchen, that the smell of natural gas was a bit stronger than usual. I have a gas stove so sometimes I catch a bit of a whiff of gas, which is normal, but this was a bit much. I went and laid my hand on the stove and while the whole center of the stove is normally warm, this time the heat was only on the left side. I opened the door below the oven and saw that the pilot light was still lit, so I decided to open a window and air things out and then see what the situation was after washing the dishes. When I was done I did the hand test again and found the stove top heat to still be unbalanced. I checked the pilot light again...Yup, that was still going, so I decided to try lighting the burners. The two on the left turned on, but the two on the right hissed without lighting. Aw, crap...there was definitely a problem so I called the 24 hour Gaz Metro emergency line and they dispatched a team to my apartment at 12:30 A.M. I was dead on my feet at this point and would have liked to just go to bed, but I there was no way I was doing that with gas leaking into my house so I put on my jammies and waited with the windows open in the kitchen and my bedroom which is right next door and didn't touch a light switch for fear of blowing my apartment block to Kingdom Come. Two ladies from Gaz Metro showed up a bit after 1:00 A.M. and I found out that my stove is somewhere between 50 and 70 years old and has not one, but three pilot lights. One under the oven and two below the cook top, one of which had gone out. They took a match and lit it which I would never have dared do, but apparently the gas level in my kitchen was fine since I had the presence of mind to open the windows as soon as I smelled the gas. They spent about 20 minutes inspecting my antique of a stove to make sure there were no other problems and congratulated me on keeping it so clean. Apparently even though it is old, it is in fabulous condition and has many years left in it. Wonderful! What would also have been wonderful would have been if the two ladies had removed their boots before walking all over my kitchen because, nice as they were and relieved as I was to have them fix my stove and give it once over, they left an incredible mess for me to mop up after they left...at 1:30 in the morning. I only got to bed at about 2:00 A.M. and didn't get to sleep until about 2:30 A.M. and that, my friends, is the story of why I slept half the day away!