Staying Alive

I've been informed by Brad that one of the items of paperwork we're still expected to turn in for our 500,000 page packet of information that covers our whole entire lives (which at times has seemed so relentless in digging up information, I've half expected them to ask how many pets we had growing up, what our grades were in high school, and how many sex partners we've had) that we've been working on since the Dawn of Time® for having Kismet in our house is a home-fire-emergency-escape plan... thingie. And because poor Bradley has been up to his purty blue eyeballs in .... stuff, he volunteered me to create this home-emergency-fire-escape plan. Thingie.

"Why, sure!" says I. "I'd be more than happy to help out with the paperwork by creating this home-escape-fire-emergency plan.... thingie." Feeling a desire to be completely helpful to my poor, overworked husband, I plop myself down on the sofa to draw up this plan-thingie, thinking that since I have absolutely no clue what this should look like, I'm going to pull up Google on my laptop and find a wonderful plan-thingie for emergency-type situations. And promptly get distracted by Farmville. I'm kidding! I didn't get distracted by Farmville. It was Frontierville. Kidding again! It was Cafe World. Don't judge me!

I found an incredibly useful site, whose name I stole for the title of this blog post. And I looked it over and said, "Hey! This is an incredibly useful site! I'm going to steal their name for my next blog post!" And then I looked over it for a bit and promptly got distracted again by Cafe World. I'm kidding! It was Frontierville. Wait. Hold on, I gotta go build my school house. BRB!

Where was I? Oh yeah, fire-home-plan-emergency-escape... thingie. So I look over the site and the idea seems simple enough. So I break out Photoshop, coz I figure if I'm gonna do this baby, I'm gonna do it right! All professional and stuff, right? So I create a new image and I start drawing away to create a floorplan of our house. And as I start to do it, I realize that I'm really crappy when it comes to drawing on Photoshop. I start drawing with the pencil tool and go, "Hmm, the dimensions on this look a bit off. I'm pretty sure our foyer isn't that big."

So I decide to backtrack and try again. I try a little harder with the dimensions and wind up with some strange spaces and a hallway that ends abruptly into the bathroom with no means of egress to the bedrooms but it's slightly more recognizable as our home. Ish. And I add all the windows and doors and start to feel pretty good about our chances of getting out of our home in one piece during a fire-emergency-type-thingie.

According to the incredibly useful website that I linked to earlier, I am supposed to then add black arrows for normal exits through the house and red arrows through the emergency exits. So I add the arrows, giving us all possible options of escape, depending on the location of the fire-emergency thingie. Although honestly? If you're trapped in the bathroom or the living room, you might very well be screwed because there are no windows in the bathroom and we have totally useless windows in the living room. By the time I'm done, though, it looks like something was knifed and crawled across my floorplan, bleeding profusely.

And I compare it to the one on the incredibly useful website, which looks like this:

Uh... yeah. So I start to rethink this idea of using Photoshop to draw the emergency-fire-escape-plan thingie, coz it was completely unrecognizable after the arrows. So I print out the good plan from the incredibly useful site, stick a piece of paper over the top and then trace it to make our escape-emergency-fire-plan thingie. I am sooo professional and we are so getting out alive!

*Addendum* At family therapy tonight, our "consultant" with the organization that we got Kismet from hands me a form that I need to sign. Underneath that was an emergency escape plan for our house that she and Kismet drew together in like 5 minutes. And it was very professional looking. Thanks for wasting my time, consultant!