The fool folds his hands and ruins himself. Ecclesiastes 4:5
Toni and I got home from work to find the chicken roasting in the oven and Matt whirling away on the exercise bike. Brooke had prepared the chicken and was roasting it at the 475 degrees per Toni’s instructions. We realized, at the sight of the overly browned chicken that the oven should’ve been set to 450. Not a big deal. Matt, trying to get in shape for the fall lacrosse season, decided he is going to take a shower before dinner and goes into the kids’ bathroom and turns on the heater/fan. The kid apparently likes to sweat MORE after taking a shower because he always uses the heater in the overhead fan unit. After a hot shower I need to cool down or I sweat for the next hour, ruining the reason for taking a shower in the first place. Not Matt. Give him more heat!
All the commotion of getting home, getting dinner ready, kids going about there stuff, trying to get everyone to the table is compounded with our weird-acting dog, Teddy: pacing about, needing to be held and constantly being under foot. Annoy-ing! But we finally get seated at the table when our fire alarm starts beeping. I get up and turn the alarm off and go back to the table wondering why the alarm sounded. I’ve set the smoke detector off with my cooking. I’m Julia Child with a fire helmet but there wasn’t any smoke when I took the chicken out of the oven. And the alarm went off again. I got up to turn off the alarm again, started to go back to the table when it went off again. I was more than a little annoyed because 1) I’m not eating dinner 2) I can acknowledge that I occasionally burn stuff in the oven and then have to deal with the smoke and the jokes about burning down the house and putting the family in harm’s way but 3) there was NO smoke with the chicken, so why am I being put-out by the alarm? As I go back to turn off the alarm, I tell those sitting at the table to check out the back half of the house to make sure it’s not on fire. Logical thinking, but understand: the way I said this was to mock the alarm. It’s like, when you’re sitting someplace and a little kid squirts you in the face with a squirt gun. The first time is OK, might be kind's cute; then he does it again and you shoot him the sneer. Then he does it again and you’re really annoyed and want to pinch his head off. Then you realize that if you just acknowledge him, say “OK, you got me” and fall over dead, he will have what he wants and will leave you alone! “OK, you got me, would someone go to the back half of the house and make sure it’s not burning down, you got me! I got dinner to eat!” So imagine that feeling at that moment when you hear the commotion and see the smoke out the playroom window! Dinner’s going to have to wait.
We remodeled the kids’ bathroom ten years ago. One of the fixtures that survived the demo was this multi-switched fan unit that had a light, heater, fan and combination of all three things that could work separately or together. We liked it because it had this cool, retro-Jetson’s look to it. Our house was built in 1956 and this fan was probably original equipment of that era. Then again, maybe not, because when we remodeled the rest of the house and redid the master bath, we found the same fan design at Seattle Lighting and installed this ‘new’ fan in the new bathroom.
Toni left the dinner table and opened the bathroom door and the room was filled with smoke and the heater unit was on. What had happened was the fan unit had burned out and the heater element was left to just cook away. The Brinks Security person on the other end of the phone with Toni; I got a ladder to look up into our crawl space above the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t a fire there (miracle one: we've got one place to access the crawl space in our low-pitched roofed home, in that bathroom); and the fire trucks had found their way to our lane and our house (miracle #2 because we live on a lane in which the houses are not in whatever system the fire department has. I’ve watched fire and medical units go around the other block and down other lanes trying to find where it is they need to go, so when the trucks pull up this is no small deal). There was no fire, just a lot of smoke. But it was close to being something worse.
When the fire guys came to the back of our house I was removing the fan unit from the ceiling (note: we have a door from that bathroom that goes out to the backyard, put in by the previous owner so they could go from the bathroom to the backyard hot tub and return, presumably to a really warm bathroom heated by the fan/heater/retro-Jetson multi-switched fan-heater unit). One of the guys had in his hand a device that looks like something a grocery store stock boy uses to take inventory but was actually a device used to find bodies in smoke-filled rooms with little or no visibility. He had no trouble finding me, taking down the fan unit. But he pointed this heat reading gun at the element in the fan and it was 300 degrees. I was simultaneously awed by the cool gun device he had and the fact that this thing was as hot as it was, and at the gravity of how close we were/could’ve been to a real fire. We smelled no smoke. Only the incessant beeping of this annoying alarm. And my dinner was getting cold (The fool folds his hands and ruins himself).
The smoke cleared to reveal something more than a faulty fan.
Smoke detectors, nervous, skittish dog, the fire department and cold chicken. Thankful.
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