Daily Challenge

It started Wednesday night. At 3am the fire strobe in our bedroom started flashing, followed by en extremely loud beeping. I was up and out of bed so fast. I was fully dressed and headed for my shoes and Logan had his jeans in his hand. My first thought was get out. We are on the 12th floor - we are on our own. (He went straight to the window to look for smoke and then the door to smell, but seemingly not in a hurry to get out.)

As I was ready to leave him behind the alarm shut off. I, of coarse, was shaken and certainly not going to sleep any time soon. I was wide awake through Logan's alarm at 4am. When I finally fell asleep again it was short lived. At 5:30am it went off again for about 4 rings, and again every ten minutes for at least an hour.

From this I have realized that fire is my fear. I always knew I was afraid of fire - but if everyone has that one fear - that is mine! I have been since I saw the baby-sitting video where they drop a cigarette butt in the garbage and the whole house is up in flames in less than 4 minutes. And made worse when we were in our old apartment and the alarm went off in the middle of the night and it was a bell that was so quiet once all of our doors were closed that we didn't know what was going on. And then Logan brought home photos of a fire he witnessed that took out three houses in less than 10 minutes.

(It ended up being a water pipe burst in the basement of the other building, it flooded the elevator and either the decrease in pressure in the sprinkler pipe or the flooding of the elevator set off the alarm).

Thursday.
Stef was to pick up Auntie Shelley and Uncle Gord from the airport. She called Logan on the way to say her battery light came on. And then 10 minutes later to say that her car wouldn't start again now that she parked. Logan called me, I picked him up and we went to save the day. We boosted her car with the new booster pack from Lorne and Janet for Christmas and thought we were on our way. We got to the intersection and she stalled in the middle! We crossed three lanes of stopped traffic to boost her again and pull her off the road. Our plan was to drive the car to a near by Canadian Tire and fix it the next day. It didn't move again. So we piled Stef, Uncle Gord, Auntie Shelley, their luggage, Stef's school and over night bag and Logan and I into our Jetta and drove them home. Half way through this trip our car started acting up. Upon taking it (and Stef's car) in - we were told that a bit of tube disconnected and sprayed oil everywhere. Sounds like a little fix - but it got everywhere, which means we had to replace all sorts of filters and the labour to clean it etc. $850.

Friday.
Stef, Tyler and Cris came over to have some tea and hang out. While sitting around I motioned toward a electrical outlet (that we never use) that had appeared to change colour all of a sudden the day before. I touched it and it was screaming hot. I called the resident manager right away. He said turn off the breaker and write up a work order Saturday. We looked for the right one but flipping the ones label to do so - did not. We had to turn out all of the power in the living space to get it to turn off. I called him back to say that it had turned off all of the light. His response was "it shouldn't". Thanks tips! The boys - not satisfied - cracked out the ole flash light and multi tool. Once they pulled out the plug they saw that it was terribly melted and the wires were black. Tyler said that if the manager didn't come up right now to cap off these wires he would call the fire department becuase this was certainly a fire waiting to happen. Very reluctantly, and a little angry, he came up and capped the wires so we could turn the power back on.

Didn't really help the fire fear!