I usually get up pretty early. By pretty early, I mean 5 in the morning. That’s early enough, right? Usually, that is enough time to drink enough coffee to be able to navigate the way to a run or to yoga without having the presence of mind to question whether or not this is a good idea. Most of the time a rational person would find that exercising pre-dawn to be a bad choice. Fortunately for me, autopilot usually carries me past that point.
So the other morning, I was prevented from going to yoga by an impending trip to the dentist. Yes, I could have gone for a run instead, but it was a yoga day. You can’t go for a run on a yoga day. You can, however, modify a coffee pot to make it into a fishbowl at 5:30 on a Thursday morning. Or, more precisely, you can try, especially if the caffeine intake has yet to introduce rationality into the thought process.
I got the bottom off of the coffee pot and was able to identify the route of the wiring to the heating element. For obvious reasons, one does not want the heating element to work when one is trying to circulate water for the benefit of a beta fish. Having clipped, stripped, and spliced the wires, I plugged in the unit and flipped the switch. A sharp pop and the acrid smell of electrical smoke told me that the experiment needed revision. I pulled the plug from the wall and counted myself as lucky that no one got electrocuted.
What I did not do was open the refrigerator door. If I had done so, I would have noticed that the light was off. That might not have meant too much to me, but it might have tipped me off to something which my sweet lady pointed out about 13 hours later when she found the ice cream had melted. The fridge was not working. The fridge was not working because the circuit was blown. The circuit was blown to prevent me from killing myself in the quest for the perfect fishbowl. Ooooops.