Blew a fuse

My phone rang this afternoon, just once, and then it stopped, and the display said it was Bob, and showed one missed call. I thought he'd probably called me by mistake, but I called him back anyway, and I said, "Did you call me by accident?" He said, "No. Well, yes. Well, I called you on purpose, but I hung up on you accidentally."

We're discovering some of the less-desirable aspects of renting in an old building. I came in to work on Monday and found my desk covered in water spots--the desktop, the keyboard, my chair . . . We'd gotten quite a bit of rain over the weekend, and the ceiling leaked. Well, actually, the roof had leaked into the floor above, and then I guess the water seeped through the floor and down into my office. The keyboard still works, and with the iMac, there's no place for water to get in from the top, so nothing was ruined.

If there's rain in the forecast, I guess I'll have to throw a garbage bag over my desk or something, until they get the roof fixed . . . Oh, and I blew a fuse today. I had a little space heater running under my desk--I'd used it before without any problems, but for whatever reason, it overloaded the circuit today. It's an old one that my dad gave me, so it's probably less efficient, too, than a more modern one. The fuse box is in my office, though, so Kurt came in and figured out what had happened, and we tested the various outlets and relabeled the fuse box, so at least if it happens again, I'll know what to do.

Jeff gave me another little heater that he wasn't using, and I plugged it into an outlet on another circuit, but it's really too far away to do much. I'm planning on bringing my fingerless gloves to work tomorrow.

When I said I "blew a fuse," a couple of people thought I meant that I'd had some sort of meltdown. An understandable assumption, I guess.

Bob was off work today, and he rented a couple of movies. When I got home tonight, I asked him what he saw, and he was telling me about them. One of them was the latest "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" remake, and the other one was some kind of bio-terrorism thriller. In this one, there was some kind of disease spreading (I'm a little hazy on the details), and people were supposed to close up their houses and not let anyone in from the outside.

In this particular case, there was a man who was home at the time of the outbreak, and his wife had been at work. He barricaded the house, and when she got home, obviously ill, he wouldn't let her in. After Bob told me the rest of the story, he said, "I wouldn't let you stay outside to die if you were sick. I'd let you in, or I'd come outside and die with you. I couldn't just sit there and watch you die."

I said, "Awwww," and hugged him, and told him how sweet he was, and said that I wouldn't let him die alone, either.

Then he said, "If you were a zombie, it would be different, of course. I'd have to shoot you in the head."

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