Fires of Pompeii

[sagacious_c]

It has been super cold here lately (cold for me at least) -- it got down into the 20s over the weekend!  We have a fireplace in our new apartment and decided conditions were right for us to test it out -- a cozy Sunday night at home with a fire.  We bought one of those artificial logs at the grocery store and it burned nicely for a while, but our smoke detector kept going off and it seemed like a little bit of smoke was getting into the apartment, so we decided maybe something was weird with the chimney flue and we should put the thing out with the fire extinguisher.  DISASTER.  The entire apartment became filled with this acrid, disgusting smoke as the extinguisher doused the log.  We had to open all the windows and doors to get the smoke out -- totally defeating the purpose of trying to warm the place up with a fire -- and now EVERYTHING REEKS LIKE A FUNKY CAMPFIRE.  :(  Smoke even got into the upstairs neighbors' house -- I guess our fireplaces are connected.  We felt like total jackasses. They came down to check on us because they saw all this crazy smoke coming out of their fireplace, and from all our windows and doors.  They must have thought we were burning the house down.  So much for a quiet evening enjoying a calming fire!

A picture of the fire.  We had the encore showing of "The Fires of Pompeii" on in the background, and after I took the picture I realized you can see one of the Sybilene Sisters on the TV.  And it was only much later that I realized how apt it was that we had this fire incident while this fire episode was on TV.  :P



The smoke smell is seriously disgusting.  We're washing virtually everything that isn't clamped down.  UGH.