The other thing that marked yesterday as unusual was that I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning.

Ok, not that it's unusual that I don't want to get out of bed. But it's unusual that I don't want to get out of bed because it's really, really cold in the bedroom. I'd stick a hand out and go "Wow! That's cold!" Looking at the sun shining in through the bedroom door, I concluded that we were being bested by greenhouse effect in our dining room. That's where we have nice east-facing windows and the thermostat for the furnace, so it was probably nicely toasty warm there and keeping the furnace from kicking on and heating the rest of the house.

I finally hopped out of bed and took a shower. The shower was nice and hot. Everything else, not so much. I pulled on my clothes and stepped out into the hall to check the indoor / outdoor thermometer there. Fifteen degrees outside. No surprise there -- daisy_knotwise had asked me last night if I'd closed the garage door, because the bedroom had already seemed cold the night before. It had and I had, so that wasn't the source of the problem.

Fifty five degrees inside. Gack! Time to go check the thermostat. If I had to set it to eighty degrees to fight the greenhouse effect, I was going to.

It was fifty nine degrees in the dining room. And the thermostat was clearly switched on for heat.

Crap. Dead furnace.

I went down to the basement to stare at it, preparatory to calling our furnace guy, because staring at it always improves matters. I put a hand on the exhaust pipe. Cold. Obviously hadn't run in a long time. Damn.

And I looked down at the side of the furnace, where a simple light switch allows you to turn it on and off.

Switch off.

A simple light switch that is exactly at Katie's eye level.

And Gretchen had been doing laundry the previous evening -- Katie's bedding, which meant it was almost certain that Katie had followed her downstairs in pursuit of her favorite blanket, Badi.

Oh.

I turned the switch back on. A moment later, the furnace came on.

And eventually, there was heat.

*sigh*