Water and smoke... whew.

Okay… so last Sunday (not yesterday, but the one before) was the funniest day!  I’m going to start at the end of the day and move backwards.

 Whit decided to make some soup.  Canned soup.  Meaning… from a can.  Sound hard?  Yeah… I didn’t think so either.  I was standing in the kitchen with her, and suddenly there was this nasty smell.  I turned around to see thick black smoke coming from the stovetop.  Why, you may ask?  Because Whitey turned on the wrong burner.  Yep… the one with tupperware sitting on it!!  Now, you should probably all be aware that I’m REALLY good at handling emergency situations.  I keep a cool head and act quickly… which is really lucky because if I hadn’t been there, Whitney wouldn’t have had anyone there, jumping up and down in place, pointing, and yelling, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!  Get it, get it, get it!”  At great risk to her own hand, she pulled the orange plastic from the burner.  We were then faced with a problem.  Our landlord’s church got out at 12:00 and she told us she was coming over right after.  What time was it? 12:30.  Our apartment was smoky and smelled HORRIBLE!  We didn’t want her to come over and fear for the safety of her house.

Now lets back up a bit.  Why was our landlord coming over?  Ha.  Whitney and I decided Saturday night that we would drive to Salt Lake Sunday morning and go to Music and the Spoken Word.  So we awoke faaaaar too early in the morning to get ready to leave.  We were close to being ready when Whitney made a tragic mistake.  She turned on the water in the bathroom to brush her teeth.  I know… what was she thinking, right??  I hear an, “Uh oh,” and turned around to see the water running full strength from the faucet. She was turning the handle to the faucet back and forth, but it had no effect on the water stream.  It wouldn’t turn off.  That, in and of itself, would have been funny, but lets add another layer.  Our sink drain was plugged and would only drain really, reeeeeaaaalllllly slowly.  The sink was filling quite quickly and we couldn’t get the water off!  I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a bowl, darted back to the bathroom and started bailing the water into the shower.  We grabbed a few things (ya know… scissors, knifes) to substitute for a screwdriver, since we didn’t have one, and tried to take the handle off of the faucet.  What did we manage to do?  Strip the head of the screw, making sure that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY we were getting that handle off.  Well, great.  Meanwhile, we’re still bailing water.  Finally we realized we were going to have to call someone.  It was about 7 in the morning, and we felt bad calling, but knew we had no choice.  We called our friend, Brigham, and he didn’t know what to do, so we decided we’d have to call our landlord.  Unfortunately, she didn’t know either!  Brigham figured out how to turn off the water to our sink and called us back.  Our landlord said she’d come over after church to see the sink and figure out what to do about it.  After we turned off the water, we jetted out the door and made it just in time for Music and the Spoken Word.

So, back to 12:30 with our smoky apartment.  We ran to open the windows, only to learn something interesting.  They don’t open!  Or rather… they haven’t been opened in so long that it would probably take some serious convincing to get them to do so.  There is NO circulation in our little basement apartment, and we couldn’t think of any way to get the smell to leave.  Thank heavens she didn’t end up coming over for quite a few hours.  Yikes.

I tried to upload a couple of pictures to go with this story, but yep... still can't seem to do it.  :S