This is a public service announcement!

Am I the only one who gets so annoyed with smoke alarms going off whenever I cook (which isn’t often) or when the battery starts dying that I just take them out altogether? Yeah, bad idea.

The other night I received a text from my tenant after I went to bed that he smelled something burning. After I was all like “WTF, Dude? I’m trying to sleep!” I went to check out the house and lo and behold, as soon as I opened bedroom door I saw smoke everywhere!

The culprit was an outlet but the REAL culprit was a cat. Do I have to spell out what that cat did to the outlet to nearly kill us all? It was a GFI outlet near the sink but I guess those don’t react too well to piss. By the time we got down there, we didn’t see any flames and the outlet and circuit breaker had tripped, but the wall was hot and the smoke looked as if there was an actual fire.

So, a few precautions if you have bad peeing cats. Keep those outlets covered! Of course, being eternally mid renovation, we didn’t even have an outlet cover to protect the wires. That’s probably why it was so bad. Put something in front of outlets or use child safety plugs.

And the good news is that I went out and bought smoke alarms! The bad news is that I’ve yet to install them.