Where there's smoke..

I could have died last night, but fortunately I had insomnia. At 4AM, I turned on the electric heater in my bedroom for the first time this season. Then I lay there awake for a long time wishing that I were asleep. I was amazed at how quickly the heater warmed the room. It had a strange burning smell but I thought, "Well, it hasn't been on since May so maybe this is just something that happens when it hasn't been used for awhile." (Before you judge my logic remember that it was the middle of the night and I was really only half awake) Then I thought, "It's strange though. I thought in the past that it usually took several hours for that thing to even cut the chill in weather like this. It sure is warming things up fast...and it sure smells....almost like burning plastic." That was when I looked over at it and saw the flames coming out the top. "Hmm," thought I. "I don't think it's supposed to do that."

That was when I got out of bed, realizing I was in a bit of danger. I tried to remember where the fire extinguisher was, but then I remembered that I don't have one. "Strange," thought I. "It never occurred to me until now that I didn't have a fire extinguisher. What a silly thing not to have one! What if there's a fire someday?" Of course, in my four o'clock delirium, I then remembered there was a fire now. It was still a small one, to be fair, but electrical fires can spread quite quickly.

"Right," thought I as the power of reason began to return to me, "how do you put out an electrical fire?" I remembered the rules very quickly:

1) Pull the plug out or switch off the power at the fuse box. This may stop the fire immediately.

2) Smother the fire with a fire blanket, or use a dry powder.

3) Never use water on it.

So this is what I did:

1) I pulled the plug out, but it didn't stop the fire immediately.

2) I realized the fire was inside the heater where it couldn't be reached by a fire blanket (even if I had one) and I didn't have any dry powder.

3) I poured water on it.

Well, it worked anyhow. Then I went back to bed and thought about how I had now survived two such near tragedies in this flat (see the account of the Great Rice Fire of 2003 in the journal entry for November 7th, 2003). I considered this for awhile until I realized I was shaking. It wasn't fear, of course, that bothered me. It was the cold!

I decided, now that the heater was out of commission, I would need to find another way of warming myself. Fortunately, there was another viable option. I had been given an electric blanket for my bed, so I plugged it in and turned it on. It warmed my bed nicely and felt extremely comfortable. The only problem was that now it was even more impossible for me to sleep. I kept remembering something about a movie I had seen as a child called "The Burning Bed."

Oh well. At least I knew this would give me something interesting to write about in my journal the next day.

darn wrinkles..

There were no irons in the whole house. How could this be? I looked everywhere but there were none to be found. It was quite a predicament. How could I show up at the church with a wrinkled shirt? However, there was nothing else to be done, so I went ahead and left the house with wrinkles in my shirt, though I chose to cover them as much as possible by wearing a suit jacket over them.

I got in the car and encountered another problem. I tried to shift gears, but the gearshift was on the wrong side. It was then that I remembered something very important. I was in America. That meant that the gear shift was on the right of the steering wheel rather than on the left. It was a good thing to remember before I got out on the road as this realization would obviously also affect my decision as to which side of the road I was to drive on.

I was in Colville, Washington for the first of two weeks of preaching engagements in the state of Washington in the United States. When I got to the church, I also noticed that a lot of people had wrinkles in their shirts, and as the week progressed I stopped worrying about ironing.

It's interesting to me how quickly we can be affected by a change of environment or by the culture in which we live. This obsession with perfectly pressed shirts was something I would have laughed at before I came to Britain, but here they iron everything: t-shirts, trousers, and sometimes even socks! As I returned briefly to the land where I grew up, I suffered culture shock in the strangest of ways. Even ordering meals at restaurants seemed suddenly odd. In America, you can't just order a full breakfast. You have to tell them how you want your egg cooked, what kind of bread you want (and sometimes they give you 1,223.4 choices to choose from!), and you have to choose from a million options regarding every detail of your breakfast. It's amazing! I don't mind it of course, but every time I reenter the States the phenomenon of ordering breakfast does throw me and, frankly, confuse me!

I suppose one life lesson that I got from all of this during my recent two weeks in America is that we are all profoundly affected by the culture in which we live. We tend to start thinking and acting more and more like the people we spend our time with. I guess that's one reason why, no matter what country we live in, we should choose our friends carefully!

My time in America was great though. I preached for 11 days in a row in churches north of Spokane, Washington and a number of people came to Christ. I also talked with a number of people who told me that they were greatly helped and encouraged in life-changing ways during this time.

I also got to go up to Canada for part of a day. I had a few hours off, and I was already close to the border, so I took my work to a coffee shop in a little town called Grand Forks, British Columbia. It amazed me again how quickly the culture changed just across the border. In many ways, it was like I was in a different world again. The barista in the coffee shop asked me where I was staying, and I told him I was staying down in Colville, Washington. He looked at me sympathetically and made a comment about Americans. Somehow he never caught on that I was actually an American myself! The funny thing is, he thought I was Irish! I guess I've been to and lived in so many places that I am just confusing now. I don't mind though. At least not as long as there's an ironing board nearby.