Burnin Down the House

Today got started off on an interesting note....or rather, it got started off to a peculiar smell.

A really bad, hot buttered donkey butt kind of smell.

A smell so horrid, that it woke me out of a dead sleep at 4am. (If anything can wake my sorry sleepy self out of a dead sleep, I know that its big time.)

What was that horrible smell?

Burning plastic. It seems that sometime over the course of the night, the thermostat must have gone out in our quartz space heater, and the doggone thing did not kick off when it got to temperature. In fact, it didn't kick off at all. It started to melt and catch fire.

Once I realized what the problem was I unplugged the thing, extinguished it, and woke up Boygenius.

I've read all the warning labels, and I know about the dangers of leaving heaters unattended, but we were stupid. Very, very, stupid, and very lucky. Even more lucky when I realized that the smoke alarms in the apartment did not go off. Not a single blessed one, even when the smoke was thick enough that it stung my eyes. Things could have been much worse than they were if I had not woken up to the stank.

Our apartment is not blessed with good ventilation on a good day, let alone when its filled with noxious smoke. We opened every window, turned on the ceiling fans, exhaust fans, and air purifiers to try to remove the smell. Not a single casualty besides the heater itself.

Yep, that's how Boygenius, Furgenius, and I spent the last few hours of the night huddled up on the living room floor with the windows thrown open in 25 degree weather, just pretty darn thankful that we are lucky enough that things worked out as well as they did in the face of our epic stupidity.

Be careful out there kids. Learn from my dumb. Or even better, read some of the space heater safety tips from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.

http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/463.html