smoke, a singer, and tea

Today I learned that if we have the wrong weather pattern overnight close to Christmas, the smoke from everybody's festive fire will wake me up at four in the morning. Actually what woke me up was the sound of an unbalanced washing machine, which turned out to be my heartbeat in my ears. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if your heartbeat is making banging sounds in your ears, it can't say anything good about your blood pressure.

Since I was up, I wandered around and discovered that the smoke was coming in through the vent fans in the bathroom off the bedroom. I was able to turn up the air cleaner and go back to sleep, but tonight we blocked up the vents. One was easy; we masking-taped a piece of paper over it. The other one was hard to reach and has a door between it and the bedroom, so we closed the door and put laundry under it. That little room already smells noticeably of smoke, and it's only been closed up for about fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, and the inside of the dryer smells like smoke, too. Yeesh.

In other news, Thurl Ravenscroft sang the songs in How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, and something like half his work was uncredited. Also, there are reasons your green tea might not turn out green.