Beautiful Disaster

It was Paul's birthday a few weeks ago. I was determined to make the day some sort of spectacular event so I started planning months in advance. I decided to have a perfect birthday there had to be an element of surprise so he knew absolutely nothing about the day from start to finish. Months earlier I had spotted Paul's model airplanes in his Dad's office. Paul used to do a lot of building and flying airplanes before his mission and I knew it was something he enjoyed. He hadn't been flying since he had gotten home from Spain so I asked his Dad if he could arrange that for me on Paul's birthday.That morning when Paul got home from class I took him to his parents house and required that he close his eyes our whole trip. When we got to the air strip and pulled him out of the car he was pleasantly surprised. I haven't seen him smile like that since we were in high school. I had achieved my purpose and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there. Then we spent some time with his parents and went out to lunch. After lunch I had another surprise for him. I drove him out the Lake to meet my sister with two wave runners to spend a couple hours in the sun. I think he had a great time carving up those waves.When we got home I had him blow out his candles and open his gifts. I made dinner and we sat down to watch "Rambo." It was a busy day and I think I wore him out, so we laid down for a few minutes and all of the sudden an alarm starts beeping. Paul started running around the apartment trying to find the smoke detector that had gone dead. That's when we noticed that it was our carbon monoxide detector which Paul's Dad had bought us just a year earlier.We both ran outside and sat on our front porch as we called the police non emergency number. About a half hour later an ambulance and fire engine show up and ask us to explain what happened, then pulled out their gear and moved into the house. After a few minutes they came out and told us we had a positive reading of 130 ppm, and proceeded to tell us the comforting news that if we had of gone to sleep that night we may have not woken up. After a couple hours and Mr. Questar they came to the conclusion that it was our water heater which had gotten plugged and was pushing CO back out. So they turned off our water heater, opened our windows, made sure it was safe, and told us to keep everything open that night. After it was all said and done we both escaped with minor headaches but we had a blast. Definitely a Birthday we will remember for years to come.