Oops...Almost blew up my house...

I suppose I have an issue with not wanting to bother people…which is actually, ironically, in direct opposition to how many people I actually bother come to think of it. If I have a cough, I’ll wait until someone has to pick me up off the floor and take me in an ambulance to the emergency room. If I smell gas, I’ll wait until the house explodes to call for help. I’d hate to say I had an emergency and have it just be some silly thing…well…I had been smelling gas for quite awhile and finally decided to call the gas company. They put me through to the emergency line and sent someone right out. Apparently, it was blowing out of my gas fireplace into my house….oh…oops…Good thing I hadn’t lit that candle today for some strange reason. He turned it off and told me that I needed to contact my plumber…uh…Plumber?…I don’t think I have a plumber. Although I did have my toilet snaked out once when I accidentally flushed a disposable toilet brush head down…but I’m pretty sure that my dentist actually did that for me. (He had an issue with his son flushing matchbox cars there for awhile and owned a professional toilet snake….and note to self: “disposable” is not the same as “flushable!”)

Strangely enough, my family was never the “plumber” type. If a toilet stopped working, my father would have a custodian at school seal off the room and build a new one. We had these quirks across the board though. If a “check engine” light came on in the car, he would just cover it with duct tape. I don’t remembering it being much of a problem though. If people were getting things fixed every time a light came on, we’d all be waiting at home between the hours of 7am and 6pm every single day of our lives! I’m with my Dad on this!

Anyway…the gas leak…according to the gasman, my house could’ve gone up pretty easily at any time. Hmm…I asked if he had anyway of giving me a good timeline on this? I wasn’t worried, but I would like to get my piano, one of my favorite pair of shoes, and add a few things from my bedroom laptop to my backup computer that I keep in my trunk first. I decided to find someone to fix the fireplace instead. I was so excited to have heat again but 5 minutes after he left, both of my downstairs smoke detectors were screaming. Of course it took me about a half hour to notice cause I just thought it was the alarm on my biological clock that I have been ignoring as an annoying drone for a few years now. I should’ve known though. These smoke detectors chimed at a completely different pitch than that one. I finally got them to stop after about an hour of their relentless screaming, each one seemingly in competition with the other to get a dining room chair thrown at it!…Part of me wonders if I should just take the batteries out the next time I need heat?…but then again…maybe they were trying to tell me something?…

Maybe the lesson for me here is that alarms go off for a reason. Ignoring them and then wondering why you’re sitting in a pile of rubble playing your piano, whether you’re enjoying yourself or not, may not be the best way to take a proactive stance on the situation. Besides, I was planning on renting this house out and buying a new one with someone one day....One that had enough rooms in it so that we didn’t necessarily have to see each other every single day! …I guess the alarm could’ve just been telling me that if I do rent the house out, I should likely rent it to someone with useful, manly skills who won’t call me when he has a gas leak!…cause I’m probably not the best person to call….apparently warnings are “not the boss of me!”