I headed off to bed last night and decided to let the cats come and go into the bedroom since they did fairly well sleeping with me the previous night in the new bed. Hayes has trouble jumping up and down from the bed due to the height, so I put a box at the end of the bed for him to use as a step. He figured out the step immediately and came right up. So both cats were curled up with me and I turned out the light.

Hayes decided that he really wasn’t ready for bed yet and began to explore. I had earlier moved the nightstand to the opposite side of the bed from where I normally had it before getting the new bed. He decided to check this out and proceeded to knock over a bottle of water that was sitting on it. I turned on the light and realized I had a cleanup to do since water was all over the nightstand and all over the floor underneath it.

I moved out the nightstand and shifted the bed a bit in order to cleanup the spilled water. There is an electrical plug on the other side of the bed where I have the a/c plugged in. While removing the old waterbed, part of the frame hit it and broke the top plug of the socket. However, the bottom plug still seemed to be working ok so I had the a/c plugged in there. Well, in moving the bed I bumped the a/c plug and sparks started coming out of it and I could smell it burning. Great. I yanked it out of the wall immediately. Now I was stuck with no plug for the a/c unit and extremely warm temps.

After pondering different possibilities (including sleeping in the back bedroom), I finally figured out how to stretch the a/c cord to reach another plug on another wall. It’s not pretty, but it works. The cord goes across the bathroom doorway, so I put a bathmat over it so that I wouldn’t trip on it in the middle of the night. Then I had to move my alarm clock since it was previously using that socket…and of course I had to reset it. All this was happening at 1:00 am!

I decided not to take any more chances and locked both cats out of the room. I’ve decided to call in an electrician to replace the plug by my bed as well as another one in the bedroom that doesn’t seem to have any power right now. I have a couple of other electrical things to be done (including putting up a new light in the kitchen) so I’ll probably try to get those completed at the same time. I know that Patrick could probably help me do this, but both of us are wary of electrical projects so I’d rather just hire an electrician. Both of us will feel more comfortable doing it that way.

It was probably a good thing that all this happened since that plug was obviously very damaged and could have started an electrical fire during the night. I shudder to think of the possibilities.