Exciting Night!

Satchel has the adorable habit of keeping an eye out for Shawn to come home in the evenings.  Once he sees the car (from looking out the living room window), he gets super excited and runs down to the front door.  Usually, I'll let him go outside to meet Shawn.

That's what we did tonight when Shawn came home from his CrossFit intro class.  Almost as soon as I got outside, though, I heard a weird buzzing sound.  I eventually figured out that it was coming from our neighbor's house...smoke detector.  I didn't think too much of it; Lord knows I've set off my share of smoke detectors while cooking!  (Actually, now that I think about it, I think I've only set off the smoke detector twice.)  But I mentioned it to Shawn, and I also mentioned that I could smell something odd.

Being the nosy good neighbor that he is, Shawn went next door.  He tried looking into our neighbor's living room windows (they also have a split-level, so those windows are upstairs), but couldn't see well, so he knocked on their door...but no one was home.  I went over, too, and we agreed that maybe it looked a bit cloudy inside...or maybe their windows were a bit dirty.  So then Shawn scaled their fence so that he could unlock the gate and let himself into their backyard.  From their back porch, he told me that it definitely looked smokey inside, so he called 911.

Literally as Shawn pushed the dial button on his phone, the smoke detector stopped going off.  But he went ahead and explained the situation to the 911 operator, who sent the fire department.  In less than five minutes, we had two fire trucks, an ambulance, and the Sheriff on the street outside.  The firemen broke the neighbor's window to get in, and they discovered that a pot had been left on the stove (with the burner on) and had been smoking.  Fortunately, that's all it was!  We felt a little silly for calling about that (especially since our neighbors now have to replace a window!), but we had no way of knowing that's all it was.  And who knows...eventually that pot/food could have ignited and caused a much bigger problem!

We were a bit worried about how our neighbors would react when they rounded the corner of our block to discover a fire truck parked in front of their house!  So Shawn went to chat with all of the neighbors (many of whom were outside their own homes, watching), hoping that someone had the neighbor's cell number.  (No one had it.)  During this process, though, Shawn learned that one of the houses on our street (just a few houses down) actually burned to the foundation 3 years ago...and that was started by a grease fire on the stove.  So apparently all the neighbors thought that Shawn was smart for calling the fire department!

When the neighbor came home, Shawn talked with him...and he was apparently in good spirits (considering he came home to firemen in his house).  He was glad that Shawn had made the call, and he admitted that he was the one who left the house in a hurry and apparently forgot to turn off the stove.  And he didn't seem too upset about the window (which was our big concern...we felt a bit bad for that).

So...that was our exciting night!  I was going to take pictures to post...but I felt a little strange taking pictures of the firetrucks from our living room window.  :-)