Two Fire Alarms in One Day

I was going to write about how there wasn't much going on and I was too tired to reflect, but then things started getting exciting.

On Saturday morning one of my roommates was making scones when the fire alarm went off. The scones were not burning, but some stuff on the bottom of our old stove was smoking. Since the house we live in is owned by Canisius College, we cannot turn the alarm off by ourselves. Instead, we waited for the campus safety to come. We had all of the windows and the door open, but the smoke stayed around for a while.

Later that night, I decided to make myself an egg and some tea. We have a gas stove and I noticed smoke coming from the burner that had the tea kettle on it. I turned it off and opened the windows so that the fire alarm wouldn't go off again, but there was still a tall flame coming from it so I turned off all the burners, but the flame kept getting higher. I didn't know if there was some way to turn the pilot light off that I didn't know about, so I called my parents. My dad suggested I turn off the propane at the tank, but we don't have propane tank.

The flame kept getting higher so I used the fire extinguisher. I'd never used a fire extinguisher before so I wasn't expecting the huge mess or the toxic smell. The fire alarm started going off because of all the dust and white stuff that comes from the fire extinguisher. My poor roommate was in the shower and one of my other roommates was asleep.

When the campus safety came they told us to clean it up with soap and water, but one of my roommates had to clean up from a fire extinguisher before and she said the insurance company told her it was toxic and she needed something other than regular household cleaner to clean it.

Apparently, the best way to clean up all that white dust was with vinegar water. It took 16 collective hours (with three people cleaning) to clean the entire stove, oven, counters, everything on the counters that we didn't throw away, scrub the floor and do a lot of cleaning in the rest of the first floor in order to get all the toxic dust out. That description doesn't do it justice, but my recently-turned-23 knees sure know that they worked today and are well on their way to becoming old lady knees.

I was very happy to have two of my community members to clean with because, not only did it mean I didn't have to clean 16 hours totally on my own, but we also entertained each other while we worked. This is only one way that I'm finding out how good it is to live in community.

There is a silver lining in this dusty, toxic cloud: our entire kitchen is now probably the cleanest it's been since the house was built.