Smoke Signals

The sunday before Christmas at about 1:40 am Ryan and I woke up to our smoke alarm going off and our whole apartment was filling with smoke. I jumped out of bed and called 911 - they told us to evacuate the building and that there had been several calls already. Luckily it was a cold night so I was already in pajamas (ryan had to throw some clothes on) and we ran out. I remember Ryan didn't have shoes so I quickly opened his closet to find some- the first pair there was ones I knew he didn't like so I just told him I was sorry as he put them on. It is interesting to see what goes through your mind of what to grab when you are worried that your apartment is about to burn down. Ryan wanted his lab-top and I looked at our table where I had put all of the christmas presents that I had just wrapped for Ryan. The 911 operator had told us not to try and grab anything- but while Ryan put shoes on I grabbed the lap-top for him and we ran. We got into the hall and there was smoke in there too and there were other people evacuating. As we went down the stairs we ran into the Firemen running up the stairs. This all happened within the space of about 60 seconds probably. It was really surreal just frantickly climbing out of bed and just panicking thinking our lives and our home was in danger. Then we got outside and everybody was just standing around. I starting crying, just from the stress of it all. Both of our throats hurt from all the smoke we had breathed in. We walked around to the side of the building to see if we could see anything and nothing looked like it was on fire. We spoke with a few people and it seemed that the fire had started in the dumpster (there is a trash-shoot in our building so the dumpster is in a room on the main floor with a door to the outside to roll it out). I started worrying about my brand-new car that was parked about 20 feet from that room where the dumpster was.
We were outside for about 20 minutes. Some friends and neighbors of ours came over to talk and Trina gave me a hug and I just cried. I admit I am a bawl-baby but it was just a lot of emotions at that time. Then we saw people starting to go back inside so we asked around and they said that the Fireman said it was safe. We got into our apartment and it was still really smokey and we were trying not to breath it too much, we just hurried and opened a window and set up a fan to blow all the air out. Ryan and I just sat on the couch for a while trying to calm down. We also said a little prayer of gratitude that nobody got hurt or lost thier homes. After a little while we decided that most of the smoke was gone and we should go to bed. In the commotion of evacuating Ryan had reached up and unplugged the smoke detector so he went and plugged it in and it started going off again. At that point we decided that we needed to sleep elsewhere because there was too much smoke for it to be safe to sleep there. So we packed a bag and went to Ryans parents house (they were out of town). We didn't get to sleep until about 3:30 that morning.
To finish this long story, we got back to our apartment and it was still smokey but liveable. Over the next week we found a black film on a lot of our stuff, but overall I wouldn't call it smoke damage. We were able to get the smell out after a few days. So that was quite an interesting experience to say the least.