Fire!

Well, last night my husband and I woke up to the shock of finding a blaze alight on our patio, roasting our dining room table to a charcoal mess. Why was our dining room table out on the patio you ask? Well, we are getting hardwood floors put in at the moment, so we had to move all of our furniture in the main room of the house out and it wouldn't all fit indoors.

We had carefully and laboriously covered our beautiful 8-seater timber table to protect it from the sun over the next week. How ironic then to find that the bag of saw dust the workers had left outside had spontaneously combusted and destroyed the table. It all turned out okay in the end, all that was damaged was the table, all of my plants on the patio survived (the oregano and thyme have seen better days, but will recover) and the fire didn't damage the house or anything else on the patio.

It could have been so much worse, thank god we were home and woke up! We had put dust covers over the smoke alarms yesterday so the dust from the floor sanding wouldn't ruin the alarms. Again, the irony is screaming out so loud, I almost have to laugh. Lesson from this? Spontaneous combustion is real, I don't know what causes it in every case, but it is a serious thing and should be looked out for. It is actually a real danger in a very active compost pile, so if you are adding lots of manure and rich stuff to your compost pile, make sure you turn it occasionally.

Tonight I really do feel lucky to be alive.  That may be dramatic when I am only really talking about a small fire we put out with a garden hose, but it all could have been so much worse that I have to appreciate how lucky we are that it didn't get out of control.

Thanks for reading!
Cheers