carbon monoxide = bad

thanksgiving= awesome. family + friends + etc. my friends katie & rachel joined us for dinner. and dave and emily (bro/his wife) drove in from omaha and surprised us at the backdoor just as we were setting the table! crazy kids. a few hours later they got to surprise her family too! and her brother was the only person who knew. such fun. dave's birthday was this weekend too, so it was fun to have him here.

*now to the weird part of my weekend:

-backtrack to a few weeks ago: something happened at my neighbor's place (we're a 4-plex townhouse, so it's the couple living next door...), something that required the fire department, an ambulance, and several police cars, including a few extra behind our building, and a few blocks away... with flashlights looking for something. the woman sat on the porch, medical people were consoling her, she was balling at one point. meanwhile my roomie's trying to leave to go somewhere and firemen are shooing her back in our house. her car's blocked anyway, and it looks like something big. we overhear from just inside our front door, we think we hear something about a puncture wound, and the conversation was she raped? -yes- as police arrive... so we three girls are paranoid for our own safety this whole week. my old roomie's husband is a firefighter, so I had him look up what happened, and all they said was that it was "chest pains." yeah. whatever.

so then this week, she seems to have had a lot of family/friends over. we see extra cars come and go. I haven't seen evidence of him in over a week. though they were neighbors we didn't talk to, we still saw them coming or going and such. they were a super quiet couple and I never really felt like I needed to even introduce myself, so it never happened. they didn't speak much english, according to our landlord when we moved in, so we didn't worry about it.

friday afternoon we started smelling this really weird smell. I got home and asked what's that smell? did Melody dye her hair again? not sure what it was, we went to bed. THANK GOD we all woke up the next day (though I didn't sleep well at all) because it was carbon monoxide! it was pretty bad on Saturday, we all had headaches, so my roomie called the utility company, they came out right away and checked the fireplace, heater, etc. and concluded that it was our other neighbor parking his truck in his garage, probably starting it to warm up in the recently much colder weather... while that made sense it was a pretty weird explanation. especially since there was a tinge of hairspray, acetone, paint remover, hair perm smell to it... and it was all just too much, too intense, to be caused by just warming up your car for a little bit in the garage...

the utility guy said to air out the place and stay away for a little while. it'd be fine. we let our landlord know about the problem but we all slept elsewhere last night (mom & dad have plenty of extra beds), and I came back sunday after church to see several police cars, the coroner, and my landlord at our building. landlord Sue said the carbon monoxide problem is gone, your neighbor passed away and we put two and two together. wow. turns out, the husband passed away last week and she "passed away" this weekend. it sounds like she killed herself. the garage floor was completely black. the car was still there. police, etc. coming in and out of the house. as we'd seen her come and go in the parking lot, I figured she was a nail tech or something, she looked like she worked at a salon. so when I mentioned to the officers that it smelled so weird, like a salon (ie. not carbon monoxide because you can't actually smell that, you smell car fumes with something like this), they said she had a whole slew of nail products and such in the basement. so that's what we were smelling. from outside the house we can see the windows and the ceiling are all black... it's just really weird to think about.

is it rude that I parked semi-illegally behind their other car in the parking lot today?

and it's creepy-weird not just because it could have killed us too, or because it's right next door (we share a front patio space, of sorts), but because we THOUGHT of that saturday. what if she killed herself? we asked ourselves and each other. but that's so morbid, and the utility people were here to check things out and were sure it was our other neighbor. so we didn't really think of calling the police. of course, now I know I should have. it was all just TOO weird. and her newspapers piled up. unusual. her car didn't move. unusual. lights were on at odd times... things that don't trigger too much suspicion on a holiday weekend, and especially in light of how odd the last week had been over there.

all my roomies and I are fine. mandy was vomiting some, but she'll be okay. and our landlord bought us a carbon monoxide detector that day. sweet lady.