Photo & Video of the Day February 2nd

Finding the upside of the evening's drama: Sophie gets to sit in a fire truck!

Last night held far more excitement than I prefer, I must say. We had an oven fire as we were cooking dinner, and the house quickly filled with thick grey smoke... followed shortly thereafter by large yellow-clad firemen. The completely ridiculous part was that the whole thing was caught on camera, as my cousin Lisa and I were in the middle of an Instant Messenger conversation with our webcams turned on when the whole thing went down. We moved rather quickly from when Chris wandered into the kitchen (where I had the netbook on the counter and was chatting with Lisa) to say "I think the pizza's smoking a bit - maybe we should open the back door" to our quick evacuation scenario... Lisa was giving her sister Heather the play-by-play while the webcam caught the whole thing:

• "Wow - the whole kitchen's filling with smoke!"
• "Oh, I think Chris is calling 911 now"
• "Sophie's got her hands over her ears - I bet the fire alarm's going off"
• "There they go..."
• "Oh geez I'm getting seasick!!" (I grabbed the netbook, IM conversation still active, and ran it to the front door)
• "Sophie's putting her boots on - oh, Summer's going back in" (grabbing keys, wallets, glasses, and Sophie's fish Red - I didn't bother rounding up the cats since the front door was open)
• "Okay guys, good luck and for heaven's sake call us to let us know you're alright when this is all over!!!"

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Cue the firetrucks: 4 of them, which arrived in under 2 minutes - yay for the London Fire Department! By the time they arrived to find Chris, Sophie, Red the fish and I out on the front porch, the fire had pretty much put itself out - one of the benefits of having a fire inside the oven where the oxygen levels are low. The crew helped open all the doors and windows, found the cats and brought them out, installed a high-powered fan at our front door to push all the smoke out, and tested carbon monoxide levels - all in a matter of less than 10 minutes. Amazing work... and most of them commented that our pizzas actually still looked pretty good, all things considered! As shown above, the fire crew let Sophie (who despite being understandably freaked out at the start of the drama, really handled herself amazingly well) climb into the firetruck and "drive" for a bit while they were gathering up their supplies to leave. So, despite the rather pervasive smoke smell, the bits of black yuck sprinkled around the kitchen and some very freaked out cats, the whole event turned out far better than it might have. 'Course, we ended up having to order pizza for dinner...

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There's not much to it, but since one of the things I grabbed was the video camera I grabbed a quick clip of the scene from our front porch... the "poor thing" I'm talking about to the fireman at the beginning of the clip was our cat George, who was in Chris's arms, claws dug in, none too impressed by the drama...

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