Nothing works, or, how Banders tried to kill us all

This lovely tale happened on Thursday, but I was too traumatized to talk about it. It's also embarrassing on a 50's housewife level. It's funny, though, and it sort of ties in with the heat tape... and the water softener, dead swimming pool, non-GFCI leaking hot tub, swamp cooler on stilts hooked up to a garden hose, and yet undiscovered flaws.

So Random Fact About Me #32 is that I have almost no sense of smell. If you want to get really technical, it's something wired differently in my brain - I can perceive a lot of smells really briefly, but I "tune them out" almost immediately. Yeah, I smelled it when the dog farted, but then I quit smelling it about 2 seconds later. There's a scientific term for when your brain quits signaling that you're smelling something, but I can't google it up right now :(

The night before, I ate some leftover broccoli casserole. It was very tasty, but I'd eaten it for two days in a row and I was bored with it. I thought to myself, "The chickens will love this!" and left it out when I went to bed.

I slept pleasantly and not too deeply. I woke up once, before it was light, and thought muzzily "hmm I don't need to wake up." Then I woke up again as dawn was breaking. I stretched and yawned and lay there waiting for my alarm to go off. Eventually, it did, so I turned it off and sat up.

Then I leapt to my feet and went bolting down the hall, because the bedroom was full of smoke. The hall was full of smoke, and so was the kitchen. I was sure that we were all about to die when I skidded into the kitchen. Banders, the fluffy white psycho cat, leapt down off the counter. I stared at the plume of smoke billowing out from under the dish of broccoli casserole. The tick-tick-tick of the stove ignitor penetrated my brain. I blinked a lot, walked over to the stove, and turned off the burner.

Then things got boring and mundane again. The house was smoky as shit, so I had to open the front door and the patio doors and turn on a box fan to flush it out. It was 21 outside, so that was extremely unpleasant. I went outside to feed the critters (who did not care in the slightest that their meal ticket almost died) and when I went back inside the smell of burned broccoli was absolutely horrifying, briefly. Then I couldn't smell it anymore.

The point of this embarrassing and strange little anecdote is that the smoke detector didn't work. I think we both really meant to test it, and after a while we each assumed the other had tested it, but obviously we didn't. My backup smoke detector (Cersei) thought that it was very strange that the house was filling with smoke, but she trusted me so completely that she was willing to sleep quietly through it. My nose isn't even a tertiary smoke detector. Needless to say, I went to HD that day and got a loud as shit modern smoke detector.

What with the other stuff that just doesn't work around here, I don't know why we were surprised about the smoke detector. Or today, about the heat tape. I am trying to get in the mindset of assuming that if it's preexisting, it's just waiting to break or has already broken, but it's kind of hard.

Also: That cat is WEIRD. Not only did he manage to activate a push-and-turn stove knob, he ignored bacon grease to eat broccoli. I'd made bacon the day before, then poured off the grease into a little bowl. I was going to wipe it out with a paper towel and throw it away, but the same laziness that made me leave the broccoli out made me leave the bacon grease out too. There were no little tongue-prints in the bacon grease.