At the risk of making a slightly icky pun:



baby's got back.

Yup, finished the back of the Central Park Hoodie. This one had been in a minor stall because while I was suffering from poison ivy I wasn't able to work on it; the guard hairs would get down my sleeve and irritate the rash.

But I'm back knitting on it, and I also (just) started the left front.

*****

We had a little excitement in my building last night. We were about midway through the night class when one of the research students came down, his eyes as big as saucers (and this is not someone who normally freaks out over things) and said, "There's smoke coming out of a vent upstairs!"

The students looked at my colleague and me, I said "There's a firewall and fire doors between the new building and where we are and we're just steps from an exterior door; go ahead and stay but we'll go check it out."

We went up to my office - I wanted to get my purse (and also the knitting I had brought to work on while I was reading, and also my laptop, and also my flashdrive - if the building was going down, I didn't want it taking my research with it). I called 911 from my office and my colleague went with the student to check things out.

I went back down to the classroom to tell the students they'd come tell us if we had to leave (again: this classroom was the farthest possible point in a large and firewalled building from the smoke).

I called the secretary at home (from my cell phone) to get the department chair's home number (she will probably want to hang up her spurs after this semester; first the burglary and now this).

In the middle of all this, a campus security officer came down and said we needed to leave the building. I said, "Yes, sir," (what else do you say to a security officer who wears a sidearm?) and had the students shut down the computers.

Most of them left, but I was still waiting on a call-back so one of the students and I went up around the outside of the building to see what was going on.

I think the whole town's fire department was there. And an ambulance, and police. No one was seriously hurt; a few students who were up in the building studying inhaled some smoke but not enough to harm them. And the firefighters had got the offending heater unplugged. Apparently it was on but set at a low temperature; the thermostat malfunctioned and it kept getting hotter and hotter until it began to melt and burn some plastic in the area.

I finally got through to my chair and told her what was up and also passed my phone to one of the security officers so he could talk to her.

And then, the student and my colleague and I stood around in the evening dark and just watched. Not much was going on - there was no fire, there was no one injured - and in an odd way, now that we knew it was safe, it was kind of fun standing out there cracking jokes and trying to get information.

Finally, the firefighters began locking up all the exterior doors they had opened to vent the smoke, we all kind of collectively shrugged, and decided to go home.

My colleague walked me back down the hill to my car; it was close to 7 pm by that point and had gotten fairly dark and I think he knows I don't have very good night vision (I was kind of afraid of falling or stepping in a hole, but I also didn't want to specifically ASK him. Fortunately I did not have to.)

So that was that. They say things come in threes but I hope that's wrong as far as my building is concerned this fall - first the burglary, now this. (I jokingly said to my colleague that I hoped no one in the department was planning on deepfrying a turkey for our typical Thanksgiving potluck. He laughed and said, "yeah, it might blow up.")