Baseboard heater contents

For your combined amusement and horror (or perhaps simply sympathy, if you have lived in a brownstone yourself), a list of things I have vacuumed out of our baseboard heaters in the past week:

• 3 leaves, of a shape that does not match the leaves on the trees outside, whose highest branches end ten feet below our windows anyway
• 1 green thumbtack
• a round plastic thingy that goes on 
• several lumps of plaster, presumably from when these walls got replastered, almost certainly from the previous millennium :P
• 1 feather, dark brown and crumpled
• at least 100g of what looks like sand. What it actually is, I really can't say. I've vacuumed it up before but it keeps coming back...
• 15 cents in pennies and dimes
• copious spiderwebs
• plenty of what appeared to be cat hair but may have actually been (a) dog hair or (b) more spiderwebs
• dust
• dust
• dust
• and more dust
• [update:] ball-point pen
• [update:] at least 3 screws

How most of these things got into our heaters is a mystery. I can only hope that now that they're out, my allergies will go down and maybe the chronic fatigue will dissipate.

But let me stop a moment to be grateful: for a vacuum cleaner, for the narrow pointy attachment on the vacuum cleaner, for electricity; for heaters, for the pilot light on the furnace finally being lit, for the furnace working properly, for the expansion tank on the furnace not leaking or blowing up; for an apartment; for private space.