Now HERE's something to Blog about !

I guess the powers of the universe heard that I had a Blog (a relatively boring one) and decided to provide me with something of interest to blog about.

How does a near-catastrophic house fire sound?!?!
Got your attention? It sure got our attention, too!

To calm the initial impact, the actual event ended up being a WHOLE LOT of smoke and not so much fire. No one was injured, and everything's okay now.

Here's the scoop: We had just stoked up our wood-burning stove that we use for winter time heat to a blazing 500 degrees, with 4 or 5 good sized logs completely engulfed, to get us through the night with cozy warmth. Heather is gone to a friend's house, Kelly has just gone to bed, Craig is getting ready for bed & I'm in the bathtub.

Right then, the wood stove had somewhat of a failure in the 'chimney' department. The chimney pipe came un-hooked from the back of the stove and then fell out of the ceiling. I hear a loud, heavy, metallic THUD in the kitchen, and immediately begin to process what the cats could have knocked over that would sound like THAT. Not even 15 seconds later, every smoke detector in the house is screaming, and I hear Craig yelling down the hall to me, "Kris! I'm gonna need your help with this!!"

I jump out of the tub, grab my robe and open the bathroom door to find a blinding blanket of black, stinging smoke already over 4 feet down from the ceiling. Now, every fire-drill I have ever been through in my life comes bursting into my head! Drop to your knees, and you can see (and breathe). Really, this works. I start yelling at Craig & Kelly "GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES" because I can hear them choking and see only their legs, as they are both standing in the kitchen.

We quickly figure out what has happened, open EVERY window and door in the house and decide that we've got to stop the fire in the stove in order to stop the belching smoke from the back of it. BRILLIANT!

Craig hands me one of our fire extinguishers and tells me to shoot the fire as soon as he opens the doors on the wood stove. Great plan! Craig opens the doors; purple, blue and orange flames jump out at him and shoot up his front. I nail the fire with the entire contents of my fire extinguisher! Craig stumbles out the back door in search of Oxygen to breathe again, and I realize that I'm waving an empty fire extinguisher at a still burning fire. Not fun. So, I grab the second extinguisher, and repeat the process. This time, without suffocating Craig. The fire is now down to only smoldering embers, and no actual flames.

Craig shows back up with his welding gloves on and grabs each of the logs out of the stove and throws them, one by one, out the back door into the snow. Kelly is in the back yard, armed with our garden hose, and sprays each log as it lands. Mission accomplished! The fire is out! We set up every fan that we own to try and exhaust the smoke and fire extinguisher junk out of the house. A VERY long process. At about 2 am, we give in to the exhaustion and go to sleep.

Craig & I both took Friday (the 16th) off from work to clean up the horrible mess. It took us ALL DAY Friday to get this back to a somewhat livable environment. I did learn that a great way to clean large surface areas is to "mop" not only my floors, but also the walls and ceiling, too.

We have ran 8 loads through my dishwasher to clean the dishes and pans, and countless loads of laundry still to be done. A bit of information for you: Smoke penetrates EVERYTHING, even closed things. On Friday, in the process of hauling things out into the yard to air-out, I stepped on a board with a nail in it. Now, let's work a trip to the Emergency Room for a foot exam and a tetanus shot into the day's schedule. Followed by a full day of nausea, that I originally thought was caused by the pain medication the hospital gave me, until Craig came down with the same symptoms. After some thinking, we connected that Kelly had been sick on Wednesday, and we now think that the bug that Kelly had just happened to hit Craig and me conveniently at the same time as our cleaning adventure.

Now it's Monday (the 19th) and the house is pretty much cleaned up, I can walk on my foot without a limp, no one is throwing-up, all the animals (except 2 of our fish) are still alive, and only about 6 or 8 loads of laundry left to do.

Back to work tomorrow and back to a regular routine, I hope.

TTFN