As if I wasn’t already freaked out enough by what happened with the kidlet (I’ve decided he’s still a kidlet until he turns 7 and then he can be a full-fledged kid after that) and the fireplace last weekend, I had yet another close (too close!) encounter with fire in the wee hours of Friday morning.
Around 4 AM, I got up to go to the bathroom (because, now that I’m over 40, my bladder has suddenly decided it is the size of a pea and must be emptied, like, every hour or so, which SUCKS for getting enough sleepage and oh, wait, I’ve probably ventured into TMI territory…). It was cold and dark and I went right back to my nice warm bed where, fortunately (it turns out) I stayed half awake for a while.
I came fully awake upon hearing a strange buzzing noise from next to my bed – sort of like the noise you hear when a cell phone that is on vibrate goes off while it’s laying on a table. I couldn’t figure out what on earth could be making that noise because I knew my cell phone was downstairs.
I turned on the light to discover a cloud of smoke billowing up from the floor next to my bed. It was coming from the controller box for a heating pad I’ve been using to treat a sore shoulder at night.
**Note: The heating pad was turned COMPLETELY OFF, but was still plugged in to the electrical outlet.
As I reached to unplug it, flames started shooting out of it along with more smoke.
**Note #2: The smoke detector in my bedroom never went off during this entire incident.
I flipped the heating pad over onto the controller box and stomped on it in an attempt to smother the fire. This didn’t work whereupon I grabbed a glass of water that was on my bedside table and dumped the whole thing on the pad and the controller
**Note #3: Yeah, okay, so I remembered about 2 seconds too late that you are not supposed to put water on an electrical fire, but if I’d run to get the fire extinguisher, I think things would’ve gotten too far out of hand for me to stop by the time I got back and also, hey, YOU trying being awoken at 4:30 in the morning in the cold and dark by strange noises, smoke and flames and still thinking straight.
And then, once the fire was out, I threw open all the bedroom windows (always fun at 4:30 in the morning in freakin’ WINTER time) in order to get the burned plastic stink out of my bedroom and, at that point, KEEP the smoke detector alarms from going off and freaking out the kidlet.
Then, after I carried the whole wet, stinking, burned, dripping heating pad mess over to my sink, I discovered a nice, dinner-plate-sized burned area on my bedroom carpet
Joy.
On the upside, you can no longer see the spot where I spilled “Mango Freeze” nailpolish a few years ago.
Just goes to show…there’s no great loss without some small gain.
2 weird incidents in less than a week...it's official...fire hates me.
I’m just sayin…
Stay safe!!
KJ
P.S. No, I have no idea why my brain is suddenly spouting all the Espanol, but I'm going with it anyway.
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