Something’s Burning

I was sitting at my desk this morning, reading blog posts, looking for spam, doing all of the things I do every morning (even though it’s an official holiday) when I smelled something burning. I mean I really smelled something burning.

The laundry room is right next to my office and both the washer and dryer were going, (I almost always do some sort of laundry first thing in the morning, while I boot up my laptop and make a cup of coffee.)

I got up and turned off both the washer and the dryer and sniffed a bit, thinking it must be my imagination. But no. Something was definitely burning.

I called TW in to help me investigate — we looked around the dryer. TW cleaned the lint duct. I looked outside. I opened up the basement hatch and looked out there. TW sniffed around her mother’s room (which shares a wall with the wall the dryer is on.) I wandered upstairs to sniff around the attic. It really only smelled like burning yukkiness in the laundry room — and strongly in and around the dryer.

Hell.

I got so distracted by the idea that the house might be on fire that I never opened Outlook… at least not til almost 3:30 in the afternoon.

The landlord, I love that guy, came over tonight and discovered — yes, there was definitely some fire stuff going on in there — and he brought us a new dryer. It’s not hooked up yet, because he needs a different gas attachment thingy and a new lint duct thingy, but it’s here and tomorrow it will be all ready for me to finish drying the load I started today.

And for me to do the thirteen other loads that are waiting.

Besides the catching the house on fire thing, we spent most of our day cleaning the laundry room/stockpile room, Prince J’s room, and the kitchen cabinets. We spent HOURS on this and there’s still tons more to do, just in those three rooms. Gah. I don’t even want to think about the girls’ rooms upstairs — talk about a MESS.

I guess we can work on those on President’s Day — and maybe I won’t open my email until 8pm on that holiday…