Home heating and protecting your family from carbon monoxide poisoning

Did you now that even though nearly seventy percent of people use fuel to heat their homes that more than two-thirds don’t have carbon monoxide detectors? Some people wait for the last minute in the lead up to a cold North American winter before they check furnaces and other heating equipment and when the weather suddenly changes and there is heavy snow and the house needs heating up, they find that they are not ready and a carbon monoxide detector might be the last thing they think about.

The first thing you should do before the winter starts when you will need a lot of heat is to get a qualified service technician who services or installs furnaces to do an inspection to check that everything is in working order. You don’t want to leave this until the temperature has plummeted below sixty degrees and you are freezing in a cold room.


Importance of having your furnace regularly serviced

• Install the carbon monoxide detector where people sleep, but not close to fuel burning appliances.

• Don’t try to heat up your home with a gas range or an oven; you are looking for trouble, and the heat generated in any event is not enough to heat a house.

• Heating your house with a gas range or an oven also produces dangerous levels of nitrogen oxide which can lead to problem breathing and respiratory disease. This also poses a danger for your children.

• If you did not know, grilling indoors is dangerous for the high amount of carbon monoxide it generates.

• It is important that you service your heating system regularly every year. Don’t wait for the last minute as stated above.

• If your technician tells you that you need work done, do it immediately. You all have had the experience of great weather and in the morning wake up to heavy snow. Besides, you do not want a heating system that could pose a poisoning risk. Check for cracks in the vent and check the system is properly installed.

• Make sure your wood stove meets fire codes and that your chimney is clear and flues cleaned. If not, you take the risk of the carbon monoxide which is supposed to be released coming back into the house.

• Always open chimney dampers before lighting a fire in the fireplace. Have your heating appliances tested by an independent lab where if something goes wrong, you have someone to go to.

• Use heaters with the proper fuel and follow instructions. Remember, we all need oxygen to breathe. Use common sense.


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Should your baby sleep in your arms all day?

It is not a good thing to encourage, as falling asleep in your arms will lead to co dependency and to other bad habits and you will get no work done. If it is a toddler of two who just happens to fall asleep while playing with his toys, you can wake him up for his last bottle and diaper change and put him in bed. Walking around the house carrying a five month old baby who is fast asleep does not make sense. You have housework to do, errands to run, events to plan; you cannot spend all your time with the baby. Of course if you have a six month old infant and he has to feed every two hours, that is a different thing. He will wake you up for a feeding, you will breastfeed him and change him and he will go back to sleep.



Developing co dependency

An infant falling asleep in your arms and you carrying him around for an hour is not productive and will create fear in him when he is put in his crib, throws a tantrum and cries to be picked up, and you do so. Some people would call this a spoiled child, but he is not. The mother did this by creating the closeness and he is used to being with her; he has been inside her for nine months. When he cries and does not want you to put him down it is because he has become used to the long periods of time he has this luxury and that he is most comfortable there. This, however, is not good for you and the infant. You can’t have a child dictating his sleeping hours to you. And you don’t want to create dependency. If his behavior is not corrected early in life, your two year old becomes a three year old and four year old and will still cry when he has to go to bed at night. The next thing that will happen is that he will want to sleep in your bed. Even though two people are in the bed he wants to be in the middle between the two of you. Should you allow that? I would say not. Giving in to your toddler would be a huge mistake. The solution to all this is to spend enough time with your toddlers during the day, and let them spend alone time with their books and toys in their room before being put to bed where you will give them one on one attention.

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Musical inspiration for writers while writing

Many of you who write regularly are sure to have experienced inspiration when you put on a specific piece of music to feel a particular way. I remember that at the end of my divorce, having gone through the disbelief, anger, bargaining, and finally accepting that I was now a single woman again, I discovered Albinoni’s music and was able to find relief and finally peace. I forget the title of the piece, but it was a heavy-handed, moody and sometimes violent violin piece, thirty minutes long, so poignant, so sad, that I lay on the couch for three or four hours crying – clicking the remote and listening to the same piece over and over again. Towards the end of the piece the music built to a crescendo and when it came to the last few notes, it practically wrenched the tears and pain from my soul. After this long cry that carried on for a week, I felt better.


Ramba? Samba? Bossa Nova? Big Band Jazz?

Writers have different styles of going about the business of writing, and as stated in earlier posts on writing, it is best to find a particular spot you love where you can retreat every day with your laptop and no one disturbs you. Some writers work several hours straight and that is it for the day; others take frequent breaks every hour to stretch their legs or make a cup of coffee. My own style for inspiration during writing is to put on all kinds of music to extract the essence and use it for different scenes, meaning that a scene building up to lovemaking might require a wild samba or a sensuous bossa nova, depending on the character and how I want the scene to play out. The music fills me up and for the time it lasts, I will write quick and fast, without stopping, without editing, letting the words pour out of me straight onto the page. It is surely a right brain thing, but the method works. Playing music in the background while you write loosens up the writer and gets the writing juices going. You write from the gut and nothing matters like those three or four sentences where you free flow a whole paragraph without stopping. Chopin’s Funeral March, Moonlight Sonata and Rachmaninoff’s heavy dirges helped my writing.


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