Isn't it nice being alive?

Because really, your time could come without any warning. I mean you could be walking down the street and get hit by a car. Boom! You're gone. Or what if you fell in the shower and hit your head on the way down and ended up drowning because your drain wasn't working well and there was water accumulating? Just like that, it's all over. Better yet, what if you're a complete idiot and mixed two chemicals together accidentally and the whole family ingested the fumes and died. And it was your fault. Now that one would really stink!

So...

Earlier today the dog, Izzy, came and started barking at me. So I figured she must be hungry. When I opened the cabinet in the laundry room where we keep her food there was this horrible ammonia smell. Awful. Really strong smell. I've been smelling it the last couple days but it's just gotten much worse. So I decided I should investigate and pulled out a bucket of cleaning supplies. Under the cobwebs in the bucket (because it's not like I really use these cleaning supplies on a regular basis) were three bottles of random cleaners and a stack of washcloths. I thought the smell was a bottle of stuff in there that had just gone bad or something, and the towels in the bucket were really wet so I figured it had somehow gone bad and managed to leak too. So I took the towels out and then took the other two bottles of cleaning stuff out and set them on the counter and went out and threw away the bottle that I thought was the troublemaker.

So then Izzy keeps on barking and growling at me and I'm thinking maybe I forgot to give her water when I filled up her food bowl. I'm standing there staring at her bowls and telling her what a dork she is because she has both food and water and I see this steady drip falling into her food. One of the bottles that I had put on the counter apparently had a hole in it. It was a bottle of ammonia. Hence the ammonia smell. Duh. Would have been nice if I'd noticed it earlier.

Luckily there was no harm done. The bottle of ammonia has been emptied in the proper ammonia-emptying-manner. The laundry room has been cleaned. And Izzy is resting on the couch after a nice dinner from a freshly cleaned bowl.

Remember the stack of towels though? The ones that were in the bucket and were completely soaked in ammonia? I washed them. Now I've got four kids. And they're messy. So all of my laundry generally gets a cap full of detergent and a cap full of bleach. Do you know what happens when you mix ammonia and bleach? It makes fumes. Do you know what happens when you inhale those fumes? You die.

So today when starting this load of scrungy towels it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't really need the bleach in there since I wasn't worried if they were ugly or not. Normally I would have used it anyway. Today I didn't. And because I didn't there were no fumes. And because there were no fumes, no one died.

Close call.

Note to self: Remember to thank God for not choosing today as my last day.