The Silent Killer

Hey! Like the new template? I appreciate it for it's clean simplicity. It makes me want to write in the blank spaces...and that's good since I have clearly been an absentee blogger.

I have another post prepped all about our Valentine's weekend...but that doesn't seem very timely now, does it?

I could also tell you about the amazing dinner I made on Tuesday night....Red Bean Chili and Buttermilk Chive Biscuits (from scratch...yeeeeeea. they are amazing.) But I have no beautiful pictures to share with you of my creations so that seems a little pointless....

So I'll tell you about our misadventure from last night.

We had a little visit from our friendly (and strapping) Burbank Fire Department. At around 8:45pm we were in the midst of an enthralling episode of Gossip Girl (as a sidenote: you've never seen a man more excited to get NetFlix in the mail than Chris when the second disc of Gossip Girl arrived yesterday. He likes to phrase it as "i bet you're excited for Gossip Girl!". We all know who's REALLY excited for Gossip Girl...but I digress). So around 8:45pm we hear chirping....a three chirped alarm going off in the hallway. We've been having problems with an unruly smoke detector who constantly mistook the steam from the shower for smoke, but we put him out of his misery a couple weeks ago and there was nothing cooking, no one showering......it was our Carbon Monoxide detector. Immediately we were both a bit flummoxed. I mean...what do you DO when your CO detector goes off? I hopped on the google and everything says to 'GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!! CALL 911!!! YOU'RE SLOWLY DYING!!!". I read off the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning and immediately Chris and I both start to feel light headed, nauseous and head achey. We contemplate that maybe it's just the battery, but there's a separate light to warn you if the battery is dying. Chris reads off the back of the alarm that says "CALL 911! DO NOT PASS GO! DO NOT COLLECT $200!". The only other thing I could find online was that we needed to have a "qualified technician" inspect our appliances before we could reenter our house....but no explanation of what KIND of qualified technician. We called an emergency HVAC company who seemed thoroughly confused as to why we decided they could actually help us in any way. We had opened up all the windows and turned on the ceiling fans, but you can't just go about your evening when you're pretty sure you're being slowly poisoned....You can't go to bed with a CO alarm going off! First off all you can't sleep with that chirping...second of all...we could die in our sleep! Carbon monoxide slowly filling up the rooms....Indy would be the first to go!

So after a call to my mom to reassure me it wasn't stupid to call 911 we made the call. Within 5 minutes the fire department was at our house....the first thing they ask us? "Did you try changing the battery?". I immediately felt stupid. "Uhhh no. we figured if it was the battery the BATTERY light would be going off and the thing wouldn't be chirping three times'. They made us swap the battery out but the only one we had was completely dead...so that wasn't very productive. They checked all our pilot lights and gave our house the old sniff test for any gas...and declared us SAFE. They promised us we wouldn't die and told us that we might want to go ahead and replace our alarm....since it had been there since 2001. "uhhh...thanks guys! sorry to bring you all the way out here!". After they left I picked up the alarm and gave the back a once over....where I found the following:

"1 chirp- replace battery
3 chirps- replace alarm
4 chirps- GET THE HELL OUTTA DODGE CUZ YOU'RE DYING!!!"

I don't want to place blame or say that the giant fire truck in front of our house could have been avoided, but I would like to point out that I was not the one that read the back of the alarm....I'm just saying.....