Who Knew?

Imagine this.  You are sound asleep at 1am when you're suddenly awakened by beeping of the smoke detector.  And not just the chirps when the battery is low.  A full-on beeeeeeeeep beeeeeeeeep.  And then it stops.  The dog scurries under the covers because he's terrified of beeps like that everything. And then you come to and realize the obnoxious noise you just heard was the smoke alarm.

That's exactly what happened last night.

Even though the beeping had stopped, I couldn't help but think, "Holy hell, our house is on fire!"  Lots of other thoughts went through my head as well (What do I grab?...Did the crazy neighbor have something to do with this?...Can this really be happening?...I better put my bra on.), but for some reason I was frozen.

The hubs made his way out of bed and looked around.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Together, we made our way downstairs, me sniffing and smelling for smoke and feeling the walls for warmth.  I was just certain something was on fire.  We checked closets, the garage, the basement, everything.  I even walked around outside, in nothing but my pajamas, expecting to see flames shooting up from somewhere.  Nothing.

Back upstairs we went.  At closer examination of the smoke detector, the hubs noticed a spider crawling on it.  Hmmmm...interesting.  He killed it.  And then we went back to bed.

"Could a spider really have set off the smoke detector?"  I asked Craig as we lay there, too shaken up to fall back asleep.

We finally fell asleep and woke up to normalcy this morning.  He told the neighbor about the ordeal and the neighbor's response?  "Yep it was the spider.  I've heard of that happening before."  Then I googled it.  And whaddayaknow, here's what popped up when I typed in "Can a spider set..."

So apparently, it's true!  Spiders (and spider webs) can set off smoke alarms!  Something about the particles in a spider's web are similar to the particles in smoke.  Interesting...

Just one more reason to hate spiders!