The other day I was getting ready to leave the house. I was searching for a pair of my pants and couldn’t seem to find them anywhere. You’d think it would be strange for me to have a hard time finding a pair of pants but unfortunately it’s a fairly common occurrence around my house.
See, right now my clothing situation is a bit of a disaster. I have plenty of clothes (Joel says too many, I say he’s crazy, you can never have too many clothes) but when we moved we went from a big beautiful walk-in closet to a normal sized regular closet. Waaaah! Sad right?
So, since we moved in July I’ve never quite gotten a handle on getting all my clothes organized and put away because I simply don’t have enough room for them all anymore. This means I often have piles of clothes all over my bedroom and sometimes the living room depending on if I’ve recently done laundry or not.
We were running slightly behind schedule (per usual) so I was getting a bit frantic searching for my missing pants. I had Joel looking as well and neither of us could find the stupid pair of pants anywhere. Not long ago I packed away all my summer clothes so in a moment of desperation I started digging through that box. I pulled out a rather large pile of stuff when suddenly Joel yelled that he found them. They were hanging in the closet. Go figure.
I grabbed them and ran into the other room to finish getting ready. I asked Joel if he’d please pick up that pile that I had just pulled out really fast so my packed away clothes didn’t get mixed up with the other piles in the room. He mumbled something that I assumed was an unenthusiastic yes and I didn’t think anything else of it.
We got out of the house mostly on time, went about our day and got home late that night. We began getting ready for bed when we started smelling the heater. It was a very sharp, hot, almost chemical smell. We have the kind of heaters that are low on the wall and heat up with water. I want to say they’re radiators but I’m not really an expert on that sort of thing. Anyway, they do get very hot. So hot in fact we often have to open windows sometimes so it stops feeling like a tropical rain forest. There’s not really a happy medium, they’re either set at sweltering or off.
We’re really careful to keep things away from the edges but the smell kept getting worse so Joel got down with a flashlight to see if he could find anything. He found a rubber band that had fallen into one of them but it didn’t seem to be hot or melted or what was causing the smell. To be safe we just turned the heat off and went to bed.
The next morning we got up and began to get ready. We still had the heat off from the night before. Weirdly we began smelling that same smell again. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when suddenly Joel ran in from the bedroom shouting about how he found where the smell was coming from with a smoking pile of clothes. He had been standing in the bedroom when all of the sudden he noticed little puffs of smoke coming from that pile of clothes I’d asked him to clean up.
Needless to say what I thought was a mumbled yes was really just a mumble about how he didn’t want to clean up my clothes. And he didn’t. What we both didn’t realize is the pile went high enough that a couple things were resting on the light bulb of an Ikea lamp in our room.
Apparently, those light bulbs get extremely hot.
Especially when covered in clothes.
Hot enough that this happened.
In case you can’t tell that’s what use to be two of my suits.
It burned a hole fully through five layers of suit material.
Here is the light bulb of doom.
See, normally this lamp would have had a fancy light shade over it. But we just replaced the burnt out bulbs and hadn’t gotten around to putting the shade back on.
Thankfully nothing more was hurt than a couple of suits I don’t ever wear anymore. I’m a little sad because one was the suit I got hired by my airline in. ::sniff:: However, I realize things could be much worse. I only just moved the dried flowers that had been sitting there a few days ago. We’re the kind of people who obsessively turn lights off when we leave a room. Had we left the house with that light on like that we might have come home to no house at all.
But no one was hurt so now it’s just a ridiculous story I get to tell.
Also? I had to get rid of some of the “too many” clothes Joel says I have. He says he definitely did not set fire to my clothes on purpose just so I’d get rid of some. But what’s that saying again?
Liar, liar, pants on…..
I’ll let you be the judge.