TheBanyanTree: Smoke gets in your eyes

[auntie sash]

Long before I knew y'all, I dated (and was engaged to) a firefighter.

He collected fire fighting stuff.  He had literally hundred of
extinguishers, dozens of "grenade" extinguishers (glass globes filled with
fire retardant that you threw into the fire - where it shattered - water
balloon style - to suppress the flames), and 4- 5 fire hydrants.  Those are
really, really heavy, by the way, and when they aren't standing up in the
sidewalk, they are about 12' long - extending down into the ground 10' or so
to hook into the water main.

He had kid's books about firefighters, old fancy, door-to-door salesman type
books about fire disasters, and some scary outdated first aid books.  There
were old fashioned uniforms and protective gear, and all sorts of
bucket-brigade worthy fire buckets - bright red with either a dished out
bottom or a cone shape which makes them useless as a regular, everyday
bucket (because they can't sit upright) and increases the chance that the
bucket will still be hanging there on the wall in case of emergency!  He
even had 2 of those huge rescue trampoline things.

And we lived together in an old fire station.  It's true.

The remodeling efforts were hit and miss.  Basement still had concrete
floors and 8 shower stalls upper floor had drop ceilings and fluorescent
lights.  Definitely a work in process.  For a while, the building was a Boys
& Girls Club.  They had added a small kitchen to the upper floor by
converting what had been a bathroom  You can kinda picture a long, narrow
room - the appliances and sink along one wall where the toilets had been.
There was just enough room to open the refrigerator door - almost enough to
open the oven door.  There was a single window at the end and no counter
space at all.

The first time I tried out my Paul Prudhomme cookbook, I underestimated my
kitchen resources just a bit.  The good chef could not have walked into this
kitchen and he certainly would not have looked at the silly little un-vented
fan over my stove and called it a "hooded range".  But I didn't know any
better, I mean - there was a FAN right??  So I set that little guy to "high"
and dove into my project.

The stupid little vent fan didn't have a PRAYER.  Blackened meat produces
smoke.  A lot of smoke.  "I Love Lucy" levels of smoke - all billowing
(thanks to a handy box fan) out of the teeny little window of the fire
station.  Thankfully, I had planned to set the uber hot skillet out on the
metal fire escape to cool, so the window was already open.  That one bit of
planning in a day otherwise unmarred by lucidity and forethought meant that
I hadn't technically had a fire (because it's not actually true that where
there is smoke, there is fire)

Nonetheless, all that smoke got us thinking about kitchen fires.  I was
living IN a fire station, WITH a fire fighter, SURROUNDED by fire fighting
paraphernalia, and we had neither a working smoke alarm NOR a working fire
extinguisher.

Classic.

The next day off we fixed that situation.  We took 3-4 old style
extinguishers from the collection down to A-1 Safety and asked if we could
trade them for the new stuff we needed. To the boyfriend, there were all
junk - duplicates he'd ended up with or damaged models that he'd since found
in better condition or something - but they were old, shiny brass and to a
non-collector, they were pretty dang cool.

A-1 Safety got a great new window display and we inexpensively avoided
becoming a really ironic news story.

sash
8/09