Smoke But No Fire

Many times a week I pray the Lord would protect our house, the property it's on and the neighborhood it's in. Today we saw a direct answer to that prayer.

Chuck and I sat down for lunch and it smelled like something was burning. You know how you sit there for a second, sniffing with your nose in the air wondering if you really could be smelling fire? 

Beth was upstairs emptying the trash and I got up and was sniffing down the hallway when Beth said, "That smell? That my microwave."

I flew down the stairs and noticed the stairwell was very smoky. Beth's room was smoky. I saw her microwave was open and this was smoldering inside.

It's a homemade cooling / heating pack that's supposed to be microwaved for 15 seconds at a time, until it's at the desired temperature. Beth said she put it in for 3 minutes! And she had been upstairs for a few minutes just casually emptying the trash, who knows how bad it was when she first opened that door!

The first thing I did was unplug the microwave. My eyes were burning and I kept coughing. Chuck called down, "Is everything okay down there?"

"No!"

There was still some smoke coming from the pack so I grabbed Beth's water pitcher and began pouring small amounts of cool water on it and boy did that thing sizzle!! We opened windows and put fans in front of them to draw all the smoke out. The pack was SO hot but I was able to put it in a bucket of water and took it outside.

It's after 8pm and we still have the windows open and the fans going. And it still smells like smoke in here. But I'm so thankful it wasn't worse!

You know I just realized, she has a smoke alarm downstairs. I wonder why it didn't go off?? I'm going to go check the batteries...