Fanfics and Other Writings

Death via racoon isn't something I thought I needed to worry about, but that's sort of the punch line to this story. I'm also very grateful to not be dead. Also if a story with a dead animal in it is going to squick you please scroll past.

My CO detector was installed when my grandma (dad's mom) was still alive. It gave an Err message and essentially stopped working. It in no way was saying there was CO, it was just saying that it no longer worked properly. I looked at my schedule and figured out what day I could make it to the store.

The day I was going to go to the store I woke up and my furnace wasn't working. I probably should've poked around at it, but relighting the pilot light on my own gives me anxiety so I contacted my dad and he stopped by on a break from work. We determined that the pilot light was still lit, but my burner wasn't coming on. So I got ahold of the furnace repair people and then essentially waited all day, staying awake even though I worked a twelve hour shift that day, until they could make it to my house. Two guys show up, one of them in training. They poke around at my furnace and determine that all the components are working as they should. So they check the vent and it's cold. It's also oddly heavy. They turn everything off so they can safely unscrew the vent and open it. There was a dead raccoon lodged in there. My furnace, which is actually a boiler if you want to get technical, vents into the chimney. So somehow a raccoon crawled into my chimney, got stuck, and crawled into the furnace vent. It was a huge adult fat and ready for winter racoon too. There should be a cover over the chimney that prevents this sort of thing, so when my dad gets back from Thanksgiving at my brother's out of state, we'll have to figure that out. The roof got redone this summer, there have been extremely windy days, and also racoons are smart so the cover not being there could be any one of these things. Essentially the furnace's safety features went 'oh there's a blockage' and it shut itself off. I'm glad it did, because if it didn't I, without a working CO detector, would be dead right now.

So now the furnace is racoon free. My house is nice and toasty warm. I also have a new CO detector and am feeling really grateful to be alive.

Also I was telling a coworker what happened and he said that someone in his life had recently asked them to help them fix the cover on their chimney since it'd gotten askew from the last wind storm. He said he'd tried to tell her not to worry about it, that nothing was going to get on her roof. After hearing my story he shook his head and said he was going to need to head over there soon and fix it for her.