to heat or not to heat

When I got home last night, my roommate was already asleep. I thought the apartment felt chilly, so I went to turn the heater up. It didn't turn on. At all. Then I discovered that none of the electrical outlets worked except the ones in the kitchen and bathroom. I didn't feel like dealing with it at midnight, so I bundled up and went to bed.

Naturally, the next morning I didn't want to get up because it was so cold in our place by then. My roommate said she put in a work order and that she heard that other people were having problems with their heat as well. This is at least the 4th or 5th time the heat in our building has gone out. We realized though, that our problem was beyond just the building's main heating system; it's electrical. Whether they fix the heat or our electricity first, it won't help us get warm until both are fixed.

I took matters into my own hands and walked across the street to the local hardware store to pick up a small space heater (chances are, the heat will go out again eventually) and an extension cord to run from the kitchen to the bedroom. The guy at the counter said, "You gonna use this for this?" Apparently getting the cheapest extension cord is not a good idea when you want to plug an appliance like a heater into it, so he advised me to get a better one.

Now we have heat. It's not great at warming up the whole place as toasty as our normal heater does, but it should get us through the night. Hopefully we won't need it longer than that for now.