Early Morning Wake-Up

So at about 5 this morning our sleep was abruptly ended by the loud piercing wail of smoke detectors in the apartments below us and to the side of us. Feeling quite disoriented and not realizing what was going on we laid in bed annoyed for several minutes. Finally, I decided to get up and see what was going on. I looked out the window and saw several of our neighbors just standing around outside the door to our building. I opened the front door and could smell a foul smoke-like odor, but saw no smoke or anything. Since there was no smoke and the people outside did not seem particularly worried, we decided to go back to bed, the piercing wails of the smoke detectors had mostly abated.

A few minutes later, more shrieking alarms and I heard a truck pulling up out front. I looked out the window and a fireman fully decked out was jumping out of his pickup and running into the building. This got me a little more worried. Then I looked up and a fire-truck and ambulance were pulling into the parking lot. I decided it was time to put on some clothes and go find out what the deal was.



Getting dressed I wandered down the stairs and ran into our neighbor and asked what was up. She told me that there was a fire or something in the boiler room and that several of the apartments are full of smoke. I told Suzy, and we were like, "great no heat for a while" (good thing it is unseasonably warm around here lately). I determined that there was no threat so we went back up and I was so tired I just got into bed in my jeans.

Then there was a knock at the door and upon opening we found two firemen they explained that there were issues with the boiler and they wanted to make sure our apartment had safe CO levels. Fortunately it did, so they said just open the windows and turn on a fan and air the place out. They left and we climbed back into bed hoping to get a little more sleep before our day had to start. Ten minutes later another knock, I opened the door and two other firemen proceeded to tell us the same thing.



Finally, they got the building aired out and the boiler to stop producing the foul smoke, and they left and we were able to cram a little more sleep in before we had to get up.

Suzy and I had a great Christmas and we promise to post about it sometime soon, so keep checking back and we will post our pictures and stories from our post-Christmas trip to NYC.