What's Burning?

From the "I can't make this stuff up" file.

So last night after dinner, I'm sitting in the family room watching Nick and Rachael play volleyball with a balloon, Ana crawl/walk around and something on the History channel. Julie is in the "sun room" (the room adjacent to the family room and the kitchen) this room will eventually become part of the kitchen. In this room sits the kitchen table, the garage freezer, a multitude of other things, an in wall gas heater and our clothes dryer. I should add that the heater is part of our dryer. How's that? Well, I suppose I should clarify what our dryer is in the first place and what it's consisted of for the past several years now. An 8' clothes line stretched across a portion of the room. You'll all be glad to know that we've added another dryer to our system... that's right another line was run parallel to the first one, so now we have TWO dryers. We're lookin' into seeing if we can afford another.

Anyway, as I sat in the family room and Julie sat in the sun room Jake was finishing up eating and Lyndsey was walking around behind him. At one point I asked what's burning? I smelled something burning, but I couldn't place the smell. Nothing was in front of or around either of the space heaters in the family room. What is that smell... I've smelled it before... finally after a couple of minutes of going through the boxes in my mind, it was hair... burning hair. I said it's burning hair.

About fifteen minutes later Rachael said to Julie look at what's in Lyndsey's hair. It was at that point that Julie called Lyndsey over and noticed that some of her hair was a bit singed... looking something like Spanish Moss. Seems that she's at the right height to the outlet of the heater... no flames mind you, just intense heat... enough to burn/singe some hair. She must've somehow positioned herself perfectly to burn her hair and didn't know it was happening. Apparently neither did anyone else. Of course by the time I smelled it, she was no longer in the line of "fire"... pun intended.

No one was hurt in the telling of this story nor was anyone last night. Everyone is fine, though it took a moment or two to air it out. Going to have to come up with personal smoke detectors that can be worn around the neck.