On The Nick of Time:

I had been feeling really bad about not getting to my mothers house for a visit on Wednesday.

Back in November she had moved from a moderately large Victorian that was too much house for her to keep up with, (Lets just say that since I’m 50 plus, she is not getting any younger.) and she moved into a three and a half room mobile home with her two cats, one of whom just died a few weeks ago from a long standing illness.

I felt the ‘need’ to see her and to see how she was doing with all the changes in the last few months.

So, I poked at Mountain Man’s guilt receptors (Something I reserve for dire emergencies by the way.) and he changed his plans and took me off to see my mother early Friday morning.

We had a good time chatting while I did some knitting in the car and three hours later we arrived at her door. Once inside we were bowled over by the smell of heating oil. We let her know that the place was unsafe and had her call the landlord.

Do to the extra cold weather we had been having this year at one point the heating oil jelled. This caused it to collect sentiment in the tank and make it come through the pipe and clog her heater. She was being poisoned little by little by carbon monoxide for days.

By the time we had gotten there it was getting critical and she was totally unaware of it because it had built up gradually. And since the furnace was serviced just before she moved in she never thought it could be the reason she had been so tired and headachy lately. She thought it was just the winter blahs.

We had headaches within minutes of going through her door. The problem was fixed and we are all glad nothing really bad had happened. But I am thankful to the powers that be for making me determined to get to her house before another day had passed. Because if I had waited until next Wednesday like we had planned my mother would have likely died sometime later that day or the next.

They don’t call me Deathwatch for nothing.