In the heat of the night...

From Marie's 365 Pictures and Hiakus

Although the title of this blog may be a commonly used saying, meaning something only in a metaphorical sense, our heat in the night was completely literal. It all started like this:  Apparently the day before we arrived the boiler stopped working. This meant we had no hot water OR working heater. Luckily, our wise-cracking neighbor Barry called Mr. Patel (cousin of the land lord, Mr. Patel) and got it all fixed up. Unfortunately, they failed to realize it had been turned on full blast. We, however, realized this at about 2 a.m. when we woke up sweating our ARSES off!  Blinded by the heat I slithered my way to the window. It was then I realized you need a key to open it. Yes. You need a key to open the window from the inside! 

Instinct told me downstairs must be cooler, so I crept out my door to go downstairs only to realize Marie was not in her room either. She also woke up in the sauna and headed for cooler ground. It felt like a reverse migration, animals in heat heading for cool temperatures. Quickly we realized our lovely hosts had forgotten to give us the key to the windows. Because this is a dodgy neighborhood (as I said in the last post), we were scared to open a door incase we fell asleep. Instead, we decided to appreciate the 10 degree cooler atmosphere downstairs and sleep on the couches. I shifted around on the cushions; You see, the two couches we have are both a good 2 ft shorter than our actual bodies. With our feet sticking up in the air, we began to loose circulation. The only flat surface, then, was the floor. After about 5 seconds on the floor I realized I had made a terrible mistake and climbed back onto my mini-couch. As we laid there, legs in the air, arms fand ace turning blue, Marie and I lost it. 

Hysterical laughter ensued. 

We thought to ourselves, “here we are, our first night in England, sweating bullets, locked into our house, can’t even open our windows, loosing feeling in our limbs at 3 a.m..” Jet lag and heat, we learned later, can make one delirious. 

Bethany, who was braving her bedroom oven, woke up to us in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. So, what did we do with the rest of our night? Well, we turned off the boiler for one, which was not an easy task. It included using a key to get out, opening a locked boiler room door, fighting our way through lawn equipment in the dark to reach the heat controls, and braving the cold weather until we got back inside. It still took 3 hours for it to stop putting out heat. And we ate cereal and watched “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”

Oh, one last thing. We got the key to the windows, and we’re never letting it out of our sight.