a flash of delight

I bought my first can of coffee today. I got the biggest, strongest kind they had at the store. But I didn’t buy it to drink. The dried grounds are sitting all over my house in little bowls.

So the other night I get home from work, grab Harlow, run some errands, stop by a friend’s and go over to my mom’s for awhile. I get home and as I’m getting out of the car I here this weird beeping noise. Our house is in the middle of nature so there’s nothing nearby that could be beeping. As I walk to the house I vaguely wonder if it could be our smoke alarm. It was.

I walk in the house and it is full of thick, black, ugly smoke. I run inside, put Harlow in my room and run around opening windows while my grandmother was at the fireplace with a roaring fire going. Apparently she’d put a really big log in and bumped it against the fireplace closing the floo so the house filled with smoke. I got all the windows and doors open and the fans going but after 20 minutes my grandmother decided she’s cold so she closed up the house and went to bed. So I got up in the middle of the night to turn off the heater and open up the house (no point running the heater with the doors open). I was worried about carbon monoxide poisoning!

So now 2 days later I can’t even sit in our living room because the smell is killer. And it’s not just the smell… I seriously can’t breathe. I took Harlow to work with me yesterday because I didn’t want her to have to smell the fumes all day.

So after washing down all the walls in the front part of the house and using a steam cleaner on the furniture and still not being able to get rid of the smell I’m scowering the internet for other solutions. Fortunately there’s no ash to clean up- just the smoke smell.

So far I’ve tried cleaning, steam cleaning, boiling a huge pot of vinegar and letting the steam go through the house and lighting every good-smelling candle I can find and now coffee. Once we get rid of the smoke smell I’ll have to work on getting rid of the vinegar/coffee smell. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could convince my grandmother to leave the house open to air out, but when you’re old there is nothing worse than being cold. Apparently my grandmother can’t smell it at all.

Sleeping with all the windows open maybe be why I’m still not over my darn cold. Darn it!