Skinny saves her master's life and their home

I had left for work at the state police and left Tina and Skinny at home as usual. Skinny sticks close to Tina as is her habit, and her circle of comfort is based on her sense of Tina's mood for the day. Skinny will roam the house and play with her toys or sleep in the sunny window if Tina is having a good day, but is she isn't feeling well, Skinny is right there within arm's reach.

I had been down with a migraine the night before, and we had this massage aide that you heat in boiling water and the granular contents turn liquid, and remain so, with a small metal disc floating inside. Even after they cool, they are in a gel state. But, when you snap the metal disc there is a chemical reaction of some sort and the gel turns back to granular form and heats up for about twenty minutes. Used in conjuntion with the warming massage oil it really helped my migraines.

Tina was worried about the high stress situation at work the previous few days and the migraine the night before and decided to heat the massage pad and have it prepped when I got home. She put it on to boil and then went in to fold clothes. After folding the few clothes she went in and lay across the bed, but her new meds kicked in and she fell asleep. She had just started a new pain med and it really knocked her out. The next thing SHE knew, Skinny was half on the bed, barking at her.. Tina thought Skinny needed to go out and told her to Wait a few minutes. Skinny took her arm in her mouth and pulled firmly and this got Tina's attention. When she sat up, she realized she had sat up into smoke.

The smoke had come all the way back into the bedroom, and was hanging down from the ceiling about three feet. NONE of the smoke alarms had gone off. (They turned out to be defective.) We had replaced the batteries faithfully every time we set the clocks, spring and fall, but they were 12 years old. We now have NEW smoke / fire alarms hooked into the live alarm system that go directly into the monitoring station and are audible in the house and outside on the siren system. (In this manner, if there is a fire and Skinny is home alone, she will be saved.)

Now... the rest of the story.....

Tina jumped up and started out of the house, grabbing the phone from the bed, as she went thru the kitchen, she saw the pan on the stove with a fire burning in the pan... the water had boiled out, the vinyl cover on the massage thing had melted and caught fire and was now burning in the pan, and the acrid smell as well as the smoke had filled the house. She turned off the stove, grabbed a potholder and carried the pot out the back door and into the gravel drive, and then propped open the back door and the kitchen windows and stayed outside with Skinny. As the smoke thinned, Tina went back in and opened more windows and then put fans in the larger windows to vent the house, sprayed fabreeze and oust... and by the time I got home the only evidence was the burned out pan on the back steps.

Skinny not only saved Tina, but the entire house. We figure Skinny tried to open a door and run out, but couldn't work the knob, so she HAD to wake up Tina..... nah, just kidding. She loves mommy and always lets her know if there is a car in the drive, a deer in the back yard and especially if there is a skunk under the porch. (hah.)