Middle of the Night Emergency (Spoiler: Everything's Fine)

A while ago, some blogger got a lot of flak for live tweeting as her house went up in flames.  As I sat in our car in at 3:30 in the morning this morning with firemen (no women as far as I could see) buzzing around our complex and red lights swirling all around me, I realized that I would be posting on Facebook, too, if only I had thought to grab my phone as we left our apartment.  Dumb ass.  (Me, I'm the dumb ass, not the fire people.)

It all started when Dr. BB woke up because "he smelled something funny." Now, since the fish tank people regularly allow water to leak all over our apartment, this isn't an exceptional occurrence.  But when he asked me to come out of the bedroom and check things out, I knew it was going to be a SITUATION.  It smelled like burned meat and there was a haze in the air.  The smell was everywhere in our apartment.  The hallway outside our apartment was fine, but when we went downstairs in our building, the acrid smell was multiplied tenfold.

After some dilly dallying about who we should call, calls were made.  The boy and I looked at each other and he said, in a slow way, as if considering his words really carefully, "I think we should leave...this doesn't seem health...some."  He said healthsome.  Ha!  Like it is a word.  When I asked if we should bring the quadruped who resides in our apartment with us along and he agreed, I knew he thought it was serious.

I put on pants and a sweatshirt since shorts and a tank top weren't going to cut in March in Minnesota, even an unseasonably warm March as he coaxed the kitten into her carrier.  We each grabbed a blanket and went to the car. Which brings me to the beginning of this story where I'm sitting in the car with nothing but a meowing cat and a blanket that smells like burning.

The boy left me in the car with MeowCrazyface and went to have what I can only imagine were manly conversations with the emergency personnel who were called in to deal with whatever was going on in that building.  When the boy returned to the car, he said someone downstairs had burned a pan really badly and had not taken it out of their apartment, but rather just sat it down in the sink.  And the whole building reeked.

Once we returned inside, we opened the windows and the slider (forty degrees be damned) and hoped the place would air out.  It's been roughly ten hours now and I can assure you that it has not made the smell decrease. We've got an upstairs neighbor who can't be trusted to deal with water in a responsible manner, a downstairs neighbor who can't be trusted with fire, and I'm hoping that the neighbors on our floor can handle their earth and air because I'm not sure if I can handle any more middle of the night shenanigans.

The quadruped who had a big night last night and now refuses to do anything except sleep and be Crazyface.