I swear, if you have old ’stuff’ sitting around your house, like record players (thanks, jenn!) or anything you could plug in, DON’T!!!
So Steph and Kelli and the kids came down to visit yesterday. Super fun, i sewed stuff for them, and all the kids ran around the house like loud wild animals, having tons of fun. They ended up downstairs, and yes, the gigantic pile of clean clothes was used as a ‘cushion’ to jump onto in their favorite game, ‘virus’. Like 20 minutes before they left, the kids had plugged in the old record player, couldn’t figure it out, and moved on to another game.
Not 10 minutes after they went home, me and the girls smelled a nasty burning plastic smell. I’m crawling around the living room on my hands and knees trying to find the source of the ‘mystery smell’, i thought it might be a cigarette butt that didn’t go out or maybe there was something in the lamp, but i just couldn’t find it! Then me and the kids started to expand our search upstairs, but to no avail. By now the stink is impossible, and Madaliene said it was coming from the vent. So i move the couch, and the smell is stronger near the vent, but it’s not the vent.
So now Adrian is going into every room, turning on fans cause it really super stinks and i am running up and down the stairs to do another round of ’stink finding’, and i go back downstairs and right when i open the ‘computer room’ door again, i turn on the light and the whole room is filled with smoke. I didn’t see any fire or flames, and with the kids in the house, i was not about to start looking, so i yelled for the kids to go outside, and we went to Frida’s house across the street to use the phone.
I called 911, and right when i hung up Luis had came home. He went into the house and said that he lifted the lid to the record player and tons of smoke came pouring out. Since there were no flames (yet) i went back to Frida’s to ‘cancel’ my order, but the firetruck was already on our street. They came in and helped Luis carry the player out, and then they had this super cool machine that sucked out all the smoke in the house. The one fireman found where the stuff in the record player was all burny and melty, and when i apologized for having to call them to a non-fire, he said he would rather have 10 calls like mine than an actual ‘fire’ call~ no damage and no injuries!!!
So, thank god there was no fire, but there would have been if Luis hadn’t came home early. GET RID OF ALL OLD CRAP!!!!! It’s old for a reason~ it probably doesn’t work so there’s no reason to keep it around!!!!!!!
I do have to say that the Newnan Fire Department totally rocks!! They have a station like a mile or two down the road from us, and i go there a lot to buy the county trash bags, and they’re always really friendly. I’ve called them a couple times before, once a few years ago when lightening hit the antenna outside and blew out all the kitchen wall seams and the bottom trim, but no fire! And then again last year when Snowball and Pumpkin had fallen through the bathroom closet ramp by the attic. I am super thankful that they are located so close to us, and even more so that we haven’t had any actual fires!!! It was cool though cause when i went back to Frida’s the second time, Fuji was walking out with a fire extinguisher and a flashlight~ my all time favorite neighbors ever!! And steph, after the ‘up the street’ crap, it’s so awesome to realize how good it is to have ‘good’ neighbors!!!
So, Jennifer, here is your record player if you still want it!!
Well, at least the piano doesn’t get plugged in!!!!
While Steph was here, Tasha gave Annika a ‘makeover’:
I’m right next to her, and we’re ironing fabric for her ‘bunny doggie’ and Callan’s frog. Totally forgot to take pics though, so steph, take some and send them to me!
This is where Pumpkin decided to ‘hide’ after all the firemen in the house:
In the kitchen cabinet. And no, all the clean plates that are usually there are in the dishwasher!!
And what about Snowball?
She’s so pregnant, she could care less! This chair is right in the middle of the kitchen. Since i’m not on the couch and she can’t sit on my lap, this is where she hangs out.
And what did i do? All the windows in the house were open, and around midnight after tasha had fallen asleep on her couch, i re-filled the cat food bowl on the front porch (for my neighbors cat, Owen, who used to jump through the window into the house to eat!) and i had my camera ready. Leaving food out attracts stray cats, as we’ve come to realize, so i wanted to see how many visitors we would get. Last night we had 3, the first two have just recently shown up, i don’t think they’re much older than 5 or 6 months.
They’re not as flighty as the others i’ve seen, and they travel together. Gee, i wonder who their dad is? This one maybe?
This is the neighborhood terror we refer to as the ‘big puffy white cat’. He has reached his claws up and pulled Snowball out of our window before. He got to her when she was in heat, and Twinkletoes is the result of that! He’s a quick little booger, impossible to ‘catch’, but most days he spends his time sleeping on the deck by the pool in our backyard. One of his eyes is blue, the other is yellow, and he is the most gorgeous puffy cat i’ve ever seen. Too bad he’s a jerk. I’ve got like 4 other pics of him running off like this, but i did manage to get kindof a ‘face’ shot:
I think it’s so funny how cats grow extra fur to keep them warm in the winter!! He’s so puffy to begin with, it looks like it’s hard for him to move his neck with all that fur everywhere!!! He belongs to the ‘people in the red house’, a lot of the strays in the neighborhood do, and every now and then we see an animal control car driving up and down the street. In my defense, we were gonna get Snowball fixed after she had her kittens, but but she got knocked up while she was still nursing them. And no, i’m not paying tons extra for a kitty abortion. Actually, even if i were a millionaire or married to a vet, i still wouldn’t do it.
So, that was my day!!
Nathalie
They really like playing on the toy playset! They also like messing around with Tasha:
