Where there's smoke.

I woke up in one of the worst possible ways this morning: To the smell of smoke. Well, burnt something. As I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and grabbed my towel, I turned back to my room to sniff. When I opened the door to my room, there was smoke everywhere. What a frightening sight. My heart pounding, I screamed my roommate's name as I looked for the source of the fire. In the kitchen, on the gas stove, was a pot with smoke pouring out the top. Inside? Burnt oatmeal. My roommate had put a huge pot of oatmeal on to cook and gone back to sleep. I've lived with this roommate for some time now. She's an extremely talented painter, a great mind with a complex and ever-evolving appreciation for philosophy, and an enormous heart. But she can be pretty careless. She's also very close to legally blind without her contacts in, so she will sometimes leave a trail of oatmeal or coffee grinds, and it takes her forever to clean up her dishes. She leaves trash bags in the back hallway instead of taking them to the barrels, but all of these things are forgiven by the aforementioned lovable qualities of said roommate. But this morning, something I had always feared she was capable of happened. And it scared the shit out of me.

Don't ask me why, but none of our smoke alarms went off. So this weekend I'm going to buy new smoke alarms to replace ones that don't work and new batteries for the ones that do. And I'm going to hope that she doesn't burn the place down before she moves out in a couple of weeks.

Guh. Never been so glad to get into the office before. How's your morning so far?