September 4th started like lazy Sundays usually do. We slept in, well, Tim slept in. I was up around 4, wrote a little, did a couple of loads of laundry, and started the dishwasher. We had 11:30 reservations at our local cinema supper club to see the last Harry Potter film. It’s out of the big theaters now, and I really wanted to see it on the big screen, so lunch and a movie was the date of the month!
Around 10, I got in the shower. Tim was awake, but still in bed, having told me I better hustle if we were going to make it to the theater on time. While rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, I heard Tim talking, assumed he was hurrying me along, and playfully hollered back, “What? Do you want to come in?” No response. I heard more talking… He wasn’t talking to me after all.
As I stepped out of the shower, Tim ran past the bathroom door, going into the bedroom. Two seconds later he ran the other direction, and out the backdoor. He was talking as he passed; all I heard was “…fire…”
While I was lathering, rinsing, and repeating, Zach was making his breakfast. The outlet next to the toaster (where nothing was plugged in) caught fire. Zach quickly got the fire extinguisher out from under the kitchen sink and pretty much emptied it in the direction of the flames. He yelled for Tim and what I saw was Tim running in to get his shoes, then running out to turn off the kitchen breakers. Everything was under control, there was very little damage, thanks to Zach’s fast reaction.
In July, we had a large haboob roll through. For those of you that don’t live in the desert, a haboob is a dust storm that descends upon an area as a wall of dust that looks like a tsunami.
The dust was everywhere and the dry conditions kept it swirling in the air for days. I had turned off the power to the smoke alarms because the dust kept setting them off. I had also removed all of the back-up batteries, to prevent the chirping that the alarms used to alert us when the power was off.
We are pretty sure that the outlet shorted out, but nothing was plugged into it at the time. Tim replaced the melted outlet, Zach started to clean up the residue powder from the fire extinguisher, and I put new batteries in all the smoke alarms and turned the breaker back on. I shudder to think what could have, would have, happened if Zach hadn’t been in the kitchen at the time. I bought a new fire extinguisher and put it in the cabinet under the sink. It’s right up front, not buried behind the half empty cleaner bottles.
As we continued cleaning up the fine powder that the fire extinguisher, I looked around at our home. We aren’t hoarders, but we do have more stuff than we need. There are boxes of Zach’s stuff in the living room that need to go into storage. The dining room table is covered with stacks of magazines and old mail. Spice bottles line the counter tops, only a third of which ever get used.
The fire was a wake-up call to me to get my priorities in order. My days are already filled to the brim, but if I can find time to plant myself in front of the television, I can chisel an hour a day out for cleaning and organizing and purging. With Peter Walsh’s organizing book tucked into my stack of homework, I’m preparing to make a life change in how I live. Goodbye, cluttered house. Hello, peaceful home.
