Our neighbors: Catherina O’Leary

Yesterday I came home from school and, exhausted lay semi-conscious on the couch until the wife got off work. I managed to force myself to stay awake and talk to her until 10:30ish (a good hour later than I’d hoped). We’re laying in bed, almost asleep when we start to faintly smell smoke. This gets a bit stronger, so I walk around outside to see if the building is on fire. I didn’t see a fire, so I came back in; I couldn’t let myself go to sleep, however, because I needed to gauge whether I’m getting carbon monoxide poisoning.

The smoke gradually got thicker until it was hard to see across our apartment due to the haze. It became harder to breath, so we finally called the fire department at 2:30 am (three and a half hours after it all started). They arrived very quickly and discovered the source of the smoke: our upstairs neighbors (the ones on whom we’ve called the police four times due to their blaring Tejano music) kitchen had caught on fire and filled up our apartment with smoke. Now it’s 2:45, I’m exhausted but seriously doubt that I’ll be able to fall back asleep. Thank God I don’t have class until 1:30 tomorrow afternoon.

The only good part about the evening was having the pleasure of getting the Pasadena Fire Department to wake up the infernal upstairs tenants. I can’t imagine their relief when they saw “PFD” and not “INS” on the man at their door.