A funny thing happened…

This was a month or so ago…

As often happens, it was around 2 or 3am and we were asleep.

I then woke up out of a sound sleep because my overlarge but quite efficient nose had detected an unusually strong smell in the air.

The small of way WAY too hot electronics. That is what it smelled like anyway.

As it so happened, I woke Neli in my somewhat panicky attempt to get out of bed and see what was happening. The smoke alarms were not going off so that seemed like a good sign [but who trusts those things anyway? They mostly go off because their battery got a little low – who knows if they actually work].

We discussed our guest who was sleeping, presumably soundly, downstairs and I was nominated to pound on their door and rouse them if that became necessary – as I was male and so were they [still are to the best of my knowledge].

And here is the thing – we had turned on all the audio gear in two systems – and some of which was not hooked up but on stand-by. So we cannot but think that something is seriously overheating and in danger of a melt down. Right? So we go sniffing this and sniffing that. The Ongaku amp? Nice clean warm comfy-on-a-cold-morning air coming off of that. The Meitner ? Nice new yummy electronics small was coming off of that.

I mean, we are sticking our noses in the most unusual places, behind racks, under benches. Making all these sniff sniff sniffing noises. And we were kind of in a hurry. This was a VERY strong smell.

But nothing smelled bad. We went downstairs. The equipment there was also fine.

Was it the furnace? Sniff the air coming out of the ducts. Nope.

So then we went room to room, just to see if we could smell where it was the strongest. Kind of strong in my office – but *sniff* *sniff* *sniff* my monitor and computer were fine.

Then I thought to start turning on the lights to see what we could see. I went to look in the bathroom, to turn on the light there, and it wouldn’t come on. Then I remembered I had turned it on as a sort of ‘night light’ for our guest should he want to come up stairs to the kitchen for a snack.

But the light was not on and wouldn’t go on.

Then I turned on the secondary lights, the shower lights, to see what the heck was happening here, not thinking it was related.

But lo and behold, the light had blown out, and apparently had caught fire, causing a big stink but luckily not burning the house down. The was a Sunbeam florescent bulb from 2002.

Well that was that. We turned off the power to the thing, made sure it was dormant, and then went back to bed.

Shame on us for thinking at first that it was the audio equipment! Bad us! Could of just as well been an old TV or computer or whatever.

Certainly would never think it was a light bulb. Kind of scarey to think about. It was an older bulb, and I am sure the technology has advanced quite a bit since those early days of screw-in florescent replacements for incandescent bulbs.

I’ll post a photo later. If I do that now, then people will know what the culprit was just by scanning the blog without having to first follow along as Mike Cheech and Neli Chong went sniffing at the most unlikely things that night.