Stick a fork in it....

After the heater incident, I was in no big hurry to get home yesterday afternoon after work, so I got off the bus early and walked to the library. I was super excited when I realized that they had the Elizabeth Zimmerman/ Meg Swanson Knitters Glossary DVD...like super happy hoppy up and downy excited because it totally falls in line with my "learn 2 new techniques a month" resolution , so I checked it out along with a random arm load of other books.

A night full of knitting instructional video, some good food, and maybe a glass of wine was just what the doctor ordered. Realizing that I needed to hit the grocery if I wanted the actual good food I promised myself, and remembering that I had seen a great looking recipe for grilled portabella mushrooms in one of the books I hit the grocery next. I lugged my 4 bags of groceries home, balancing them on what few library books would not fit in my ginormously over sized purse.

Halfway through putting the groceries away I realized that our refrigerator was dead.

Stone cold dead.

Obviously, my luck with inanimate objects has been terribly lacking lately. Good news is that nothing for my portabellas needed refrigeration if I started right away, so dinner was saved. Once Boygenius got home, he took what little refrigerator stuff that could be salvaged over to his mom's house for storage.

When I tried to report the issue, apartment maintenance would not answer the phone (This bugs me since I work for a maintenance department and you *always* answer the phone). I left a message. I cleaned the remaining carnage from the fridge, cooked up the shrooms, and finally sat down to relax in front of some fine knitting instruction with a glass of wine.

As I was watching, I knit the most beautiful short row heel of my life on the first of my "feet like a rainbow socks". I mean, it was so fine I wanted to make sweet, sweet, love to it. But our love was fleeting.

In keeping with the last 24 hours of luck, I had to frog it because the sock would no longer fit around the widest circumference of my foot and I needed to add additional stitches. Even worse, I was so mentally whooped that I forgot to photograph the heel in all of its glory before I ripped it out. I'll admit that the wine may have had a little something to do with my forgetfulness...but as for the heel, you will just have to take my word for it. It was glorious!!!!!

As for the fridge-I called the management company again this morning, and they are sending someone out to replace it. It should be there before I get home from work. Wahoo!

I've got big plans for the evening too: they include transferring our 10 tons of magnets onto the new fridge, napping, then watching whatever the Netflix fairy decided to drop in my mailbox. Zimmermania can start again tommorrow since I refuse to do anything productive tonight. Not a blessed thing.

May the knitting resume tommorrow!

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