Charred curtains, painting the stairwells, and yet more Barbies
Well… here I was yesterday afternoon thinking, shit, another Saturday blog with nothing much to report other than some of the peonies have started to bloom and what the Hell do I have to show for the week that’s interesting for a blog…
Careful what you wish for and remember that “may you living in interesting times” is a Chinese curse, not a Chinese blessing.
So… all Friday evening I was wondering all evening what that awful smell of something burning was and assumed it was the neighbors using their fireplace since it’s been kinda cold lately and I couldn’t seem to spot anything awry or find an area where the smell was strongest.
Then I headed upstairs to close my west hallway curtains for the night and… bloody hell…
😳😲
As best as I can figure, a glitter/snow globe Buddha on the windowsill acted like a giant magnifying glass and caused the edge of the curtain to smolder, also left a stain on the window ledge and the ceiling but thank God nothing worse than that. (It had already burned itself out prior to me heading up there around 10pm.)
It also dropped ash all over a 100% wool rug but no damage to the rug and it obviously didn’t catch fire.
Now to figure out how to get the smell out of upstairs – it happened right in front of the cold air return vent so I guess that’s why the living room and other areas downstairs had the smell, but it’s dissipated from down here already.
I took down the burnt curtain and its mate (which had some charred trim stuck to the back of it). Those two will both be thrown in the trash, but for now, I threw them outside onto the concrete patio.
Weird thing is the snow globe has been sitting on the window ledge in the same spot for a year and a half with no problem til now. I did go around and remove any and all glass knickknacks from anywhere remotely close to a window, though.
I love me some snow globes but causing anything to burn in my house is a purgeable offence and this Buddha snow globe shall be sent packing with my next carload of junk to get dropped off at Value Village next week. In the meantime, he’s been banished to the always dark spare room, far from windows and combustibles.
The other weird thing is the Mercury retrograde just started. Last Mercury retrograde in February I had this dream where I was in my office (across the hall from the curtain that burned) and some textiles in there caught fire and in the dream I was unable to move or take action of any kind and couldn’t put it out, waking up as the flames grew a couple feet away from me. Since then I’ve been extra paranoid about incense and candles (I put the incense holders in the bathroom sinks so the ash can’t land on anything flammable, lol… and I only use jar candles on occasion, also far from anything that can burn) but for whatever reason the snow globe thing didn’t occur to me. D’oh!
Kinda funny in a way that it was a Buddha snow globe, considering that I have a thing for collecting Buddhas and tend to view them as protective. Like on the ledge between my kitchen and the side entry to the house I have an Avalokiteshvara figurine that I used to have at my jam space and always felt he protected it. Definitely ran down, patted his head and said thanks that the charred curtains were the worst of it tonight, lol… and then put an Amitabha Buddha on the window ledge where the charring had occurred, went through and did a cleansing of the whole house, etc.
Granted that snow globe Buddha comes from Homesense and thus is a cheap and crassly commercial version.
Well… all’s well that ends well, and I guess I need new curtains for the upstairs hall since I now only have 2 and not 4 matching ones. 😖
And the 2 will also be donated next week.
Oh well, I was thinking last month that I wish I’d picked more colorful curtains for up there, so I guess that’s what I’ll look for. Coulda done without a potentially dangerous situation as the impetus to get brighter curtains, though.
I was up past 3am with the windows wide open trying to air things out last night and expect to have the windows open all day today, complete with fans and air filters… usually in use because hypothetically speaking my dusting habits leave something to be desired and I have allergies, but HEPA filters do help with smoke as well… well, that’s what my chain-smoking aunt used to claim but really they just take the edge off.
I just hope I can get the smoke smell out before my brother returns from down south next week, as he has issues with chemical sensitivities and the last thing he needs is the smell of smoke right outside the spare room door.
What else… I mean, that was the big news of the week… well, in more mundane household news I finally exterminated the previous owner’s last bit of blah beige and I painted the damn stairwell. Only 2 1/2 years after buying the place, lol…
The color is “Yucatan” by Behr and it flows out of the back foyer, which I painted almost 2 years ago. I did a bit of a messy job, but the coverage is decent and I don’t much feel like doing a second coat (I didn’t in the back foyer either) so probably that’s it for the blue. I do need to touch up the edges of the stairs with white, and as you can see, the previous owner used an off-white for the bannisters as she did for all the trim in the house instead of using a proper crisp white like a sane person would, so I really should paint the bannisters as well… except I’ll probably leave that for later in the summer. Or eventually when the off-white pisses me off enough to just do it.
I really should have done all the trim snow white as soon as I got possession of the house, but… oh well. This and the trim around the back French doors are the only bits that I didn’t do already.
The important thing is the beige/taupe is now completely eradicated from the walls.
In Barbie acquisition news… lol, I was gonna post about the redheaded doll that I got that looks like me (or me if I was thin and didn’t always have my hair up in a ponytail all the time) but I see she’s in a photo I posted in last week’s blog, sitting next to the I-Swear-I-Have-No-Idea-Who-He-Reminds-Me-Of Ken.
So she’s not new this week. However, I did put them off in their own little spot, which will be commented on by Zamo in tomorrow’s episode. (Zamo still thinks it’s a Squeaky Simon LeBon Man-Barbie doll.)
In any case, some previously ordered Barbies did arrive this week, ready for duty as middle-aged would-be groupies.
One of those is one of the “four frumps” I mentioned before. Susan B. Anthony to be precise. Why does she have a fat ass and a skinny neck? Mattel magick, I guess.
The other is a Tokyo 2020 skateboarder Barbie who looks exactly like someone I used to know a couple years back (right down to the caterpillar brows) but that’s about all I should say about that. She actually looks quite different that I expected, but the face was so tiny on the Amazon pic… meh, it doesn’t matter anyway.
Oh, and remember the main character’s soon-to-be-third-ex-wife? She’s porking her personal trainer and he arrived this week.
He’s a generic “special forces” action figure who came with a bunch of cool accessories like cash and guns. I can’t help but feel like his name should be Hans, kinda looks like Till Lindemann from Rammstein, actually.
Well, it’s been a long post, let’s wrap it up with some nice non-smoldering garden pics of things that smell a lot better than my upstairs hall, lol…
