Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

A couple of hours after I posted yesterday, the building fire alarms went off. They are very loud and bright, designed to be sure that you notice them and go outside.

This time, there was actual smoke in the back stairs, and I believe a bit of fire in one of the laundry machines. The firefighters came in good time and did a thorough job, but I unexpectedly spent half an hour or so outdoors, in lightweight pants, at about 38F/3C. It wouldn't have been that long, except that the firefighters didn't have the code to turn the alarm off, and had to get someone from building management to come over and deal with it.

Once we got the all-clear, we could only find one of the cats. This looked like a problem, because Cattitude had led a firefighter through our apartment to the back stairway, and the door was open for a bit. We looked around, worriedly, including me climbing the stairs to the fourth floor looking for Molly. I came back, and soon after she emerged from hiding. She'd been under a dresser, which is not one of her usual hiding places.

After all that, nobody was up for cooking, and our usual pizza/Indian food delivery place is closed Mondays, so we pulled the lentil-and-walnut pasta sauce out of the freezer.

I am feeling basically calm today, but when I went for a walk, my quadriceps were reminding me that I don't climb a lot of stairs these days, because they can be hard on my knees. I've also been more distractable than usual today, but nothing seriously bad has happened, and I remembered my pills and to use the flutter valve to clear my lungs.

Adrian continues to soothe herself with the useful task of not just loading books into bookcases, but sorting as she goes. Cattitude and i haven't bothered with much sorting of our books, figuring that we had too few shelves and still a lot of boxes to unpack, but I am quite happy to have it done. One of the bookcases they brought over yesterday is now in the kitchen, with the cookbooks arranged so the ones we use most often are visible and also in easy reach for me.

Cattitude went downstairs today, to see if he could do laundry (no), and thus discovered that the firefighters had broken the lock on the back door of the building, and also the locks on all the small storage units, presumably checking to make sure nothing was smoldering. He went looking for a new lock today, but what we want is a padlock with keys, and the nearby CVS only had combination locks. So we will look elsewhere tomorrow, and not worry about it for a day or two.