We don’t get many trick-or-treaters in the suburban mountains – the distance between homes is too large and people value their privacy too much for it to be an efficient use of those few hours trick-or-treaters get to gather their tons of candies and sweets. I mean, we’ll get one every few years and, since we have purchased no candy for this rare Halloween emergency, we give them 10 bucks or so [hey, the made it up 50 yards of a steep driveway and then up 45 steps, in the dark, on Halloween, they deserve to be rewarded for their intrepidity]

Last night was an average Halloween, and we received no visitors. Just kind of hung out. It was a really warm [for these parts] Halloween and maybe we should have gone out and done something. I don’t know. You never really do. ‘Know’, I mean.

So we were just hanging out, shooting the breeze, marveling at this or that piece of juicy insider gossip that most people would probably find incredibly geeky and BAMM! the stereo starts playing music.

Kind of weird…

You know, when this happens, we check to see if someone is holding the remote, and then, which happens sometimes, we check to see if someone is SITTING on the remote. So a little squirming and a ‘finally getting up and peering at the couch’ later, … no remote. The remote is sitting on the CD player.

Hmm….

Well, we all have probably been there when a little power spike comes through that is hardly noticeable but is severe enough to power cycle something that is set to AutoPlay on power-up.

Well, this CD player was not set for AutoPlay but it does have the capability, so maybe a few bits in its EPROM got munged and well, there is nothing spooky about this. These things happen, right?

This particular CD that was now playing was one of those sampler CDs. It sounded pretty good so we left it playing and went back to our gossiping and frenzied giggling [just kidding :-)]. So first we heard an old Dire Straits cut, then an old Pretenders, then a cut from the Police [Roxxxxxxxaaaaaaaaaaaaane… ], and we were really feeling the groove, you know?

So I asked Neli, when did you get this CD? and she tells me that she had no IDEA what CD it was, that I must have put it in.

Yeah, right.

Well, maybe. My memory these days, I got CRS [Can’t Remember Shtuff] syndrome. Maybe I DID put it in. Still wondered what CD it could possibly be – I do not usually buy and do not often like compilation CDs. They usually just have a few songs I like and then the rest of the time I just really wanna wanna wanna push Next Track.

Well stranger things have happened, so I somehow must have purchased this CD and at some time in the recent past actually put it in the CD player. OK. [see CRS syndrome above :-)]. This is my life – I don’t pay close attention to the things I am doing and so have no memory of them actually occurring.

But then… But then, in the middle of Sympathy for the Devil [sounded like the cut on Get Your YaYa’s Out. An awesome cut, but this one sounded remastered or something because it actually sounded Tony-the-Tiger GRRRREAT] it just stopped playing.

Another power spike? Probably.

Well, I was really enjoying that and, when the music did not restart on its own [funny how easy we get to labor-saving power spikes] I grunted and groaned [for good effect]. got up and pressed play, intending on skipping tracks until we got back to the Stones.

But the weirdest thing… the first track was the 1st movement of Nelson’s Mass. I pressed skip, still looking for the Stones, but the entire CD was Haydn masses. This was weird AND really kind of annoying. I popped the CD out and yep, Haydn.

Hmmmmm…..

Well, we did what any normal, warm-blooded human being would do in this situation. We shrugged our shoulders and played the Haydn.

Still. Kind of mysterious….

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.

[Thanks Mike M!]