The Smell Detective

Whew, we narrowly avoided expiring in our sleep the other night, or at least that's how we saw it at the time. I was whiling away, working hard (okay, reading blogs) when I looked at my husband.

"Do you smell something?"

He (always the more panicky one) jumps up. "Yes" he says, and starts sniffing around while I continue to sit, ensuring the laptop was not slowly melting my new comfy blanky. He wanders, checks outside, sniffs some more. We are both quite smell-locator impaired but he did confirm that smell was significantly less upstairs, where our precious beings were snoozing.

Not one to enjoy sniffing around, so to speak, I thunk and thunk - what did I just do? What has changed?

"It's something burning, burning plastic," says hubbie. I was running the dryer. Did a stray low melting temperature toy jump in there? Nope. Any remnants of the pants D had burned on the halogen lamp? (swear we need to rid the planet of those things). In typical fashion I had melted some packing on the stove a few days before, but it couldn't be that.

I wandered in the kitchen, and thought, well, I was running the dishwasher (ironically as that was beginning to smell), and alas, an Ikea bowl, melted clean in half by the hot coils at the bottom.

Whew, we could now rest easily (it was 11pm) knowing the fumes would not take us as we slept.