Comedy Through The Chaos: Is Your Mental Smoke Detector Going Off?

Hello, Hello. And Happy Thursday Cadre Sphere. Hello Colleen. Hello. Good to see you. I hope that you are having a fantastic day. For anybody who is joining us, I am Ms. Shannon. I am a variety of things word related including a comedian, a corporate speaker, a voice actor, an event emcee and things that I word slinger here based in the Twin Cities. I am also fortunate to be the proud mother of an adorable 16 year old who I call cycling kid who happens to also be high supports on the autism spectrum.

Hello, Joe, good to see you. I feel like that is the first time I have seen your name pop up in my live stream. So welcome, welcome. Hello Jules. Good to see you as well. Hello. Hello Colleen. I need to follow up with you on some other stuff. I think I owe you Deliverables. I apologize. So hello to everyone who is joining me here for today's Cadre Spear edition of Comedy through the Chaos. As people are continuing to join us or as they are getting prepared to launch into the replay if you're not catching us live.

I'm be honest with you. Full disclosure, this has been a very complex day. It was a morning. Hello Jules. I was expecting to be able to have a mediation meeting earlier this morning that would bring closure, hopefully or some sort of resolution to some stuff regarding my kiddo and it did not happen. And so it has been a very frustrating day and actually a very frustrating month or so of me continually calming myself down and trying to maintain my adrenal capacity regarding things that I cannot control.

So maybe you are in that space as well in your life. So I am doing my best to exhale through all of the things that are going on so I can explain, understand if you're in that place as well. Regarding what I wanted to share with everybody today, one of the things that has been going on, especially in our house, one of the things that is most important in our house as far as apparati is our kitchen oven. I use it often not only because I consider myself a very good home cook, but because it is a daily requirement for my kiddo.

One of the things he primary consumes is a variety of baked pizzas and he is at least flexible to the point that he is now rotating through some new ones. Right. Breathe in the good and out with the bad. And sometimes it's just breathing out just so that you can go I holding my breath isn't helping. So thank you very much, Jules. So in our house we do a lot with the oven and I use it a lot. And so what I had Noticed is that my. Hello, Ashley. Thanks for joining us. What I had noticed about my oven is that every time I baked something, it would set off my smoke detector in my hallway.

Every time, no matter what it was that I was cooking, no matter how long I needed to have it in there, it felt like there was no short jaunt. There is always, always something that is going off and causing the smoke detector to go off. And sometimes because he may decide that he wants pizza multiple times a day, that means that sometimes there are two times during the day that my smoke detector is going off. And so I would do that whole thing, grab the fan, because I have a bunch of fans. I'll show it here.

I have all these fans. I'm gonna reach over here and show you the variety of fans that live in my existence like this. So I would grab one of my beautiful fans and go over to the smoke detector and blow the smoke away and long enough to continue feeding him his pizza and turning it off. It is wintry here in the great state of Minnesota. I'd have my windows open, I'd have the door in our kitchen open, and still we would end up having smoke. So I will also be honest with you. I am not a clean freak, but I am a clean person.

I have cleaned my oven on a regular basis. It even has one of those things underneath that's supposed to catch all of the drippings and such. And I cleaned that. I replaced it. I did all these things. And still smoke, still fan, still smoke detector going off. Sure. My neighbors are really concerned about me and what I have going on and probably worried that I'm a cause of fire and that the insurance company is going to come. I don't know. So I've been cleaning the oven and doing all this stuff, and I looked in it, and I even got to the point that I got, like, the super oven cleaner.

Like, I mean, that industrial strength oven cleaner, y'all, the stuff that I try not to use, because I'm pretty sure it's not good for the environment. Like, it was bad enough that I went and got some of my leftover KN95 masks that I still have from when I stocked up in the midst of the pandemic, put that on, got out my good old school gloves and went in there and scrubbed the oven. Thought I was good. It looked as good as it did the day that I purchased it. Right. And then I still put in the pizza.

And then 10 minutes later, alarm going off. So I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is Wrong. Do I need to start afresh? How could I possibly still be doing this? I'm about to start looking up why the smoke detector is going off. So in comes my sister Casey, who is the sweetest one of all of us in our family. I am the oldest of three, so my sister Casey is the middle one, and she is fantastic. So she turns out to have a variety of wonderful ideas and also hidden talents because she was the one that said, hey, have you checked the broiler?

So the way my oven is at the base, we have that little broiler thing. And I know some people, like, keep old pans and stuff in it. I don't have anything in it. I never use it. I don't have to broil, you know, kind of thing. I haven't opened it in a millennia. And so I'm like, no, I didn't check the broiler and see what's under there. So it turns out my sister Casey is the broiler whisperer. And she's the one that suggested that I go and look in the broiler and see if there was anything hiding down there.

And of course, she was correct. And so there were some drippings that had managed to make their way to the broiler. There were some things that were down there that I won't, in this polite company, describe to you. But there was a necessary to get some additional cleaning products. I even had to, like, hold my hand just right and squeeze into some tight spaces to get some of the gunk out of the broiler that I did not know was there and was causing issues in my life. So I encourage you to think about your personal smoke detector.

Is there something in your life that is causing alarm that you think that you are addressing? And it is still continuing to go off. Have you done your best to clean up the messy portions in your life that you can. Can see? And you're still going, but why is my personal emotional smoke detector still continuing to go off? So it might be that there are some nooks and crannies in your personal boiler that you have not addressed recently. And it's very easy, if you're like me, to forget something that the emotional version of out of sight, out of mind, you know, kind of thing.

So maybe there are some drippings down there. Maybe there's some. Some greasy bits in your boiler that you didn't know about. It might be something really silly from back in the day, something petty from when we were younger that popped up that time that you. I don't know, tripped in front of your ninth grade crush. I don't know, maybe something like that. It doesn't always have to be a big thing, but it might still be down there causing trouble. It might still be a messy nook or cranny in your emotional broiler that you haven't cleaned out in a while.

And so maybe you need to get a scrub brush and go and check out some of those extra spaces. If you're going, why? I've done the work. I've turned the rocks. I made sure that they haven't become walls. But then there's still something that is holding you back or holding you down or causing some sort of emotional distress maybe some of you forgot about and that you haven't looked at in a while. So I encourage you to look into the nooks and crannies of your emotional broiler drawers. Clean those out.

Hopefully you have somebody in your life, like my sister, that can give you wise counsel and help you find some of it might be some of us that are here in the Cadre sphere that can help you workshop what else you maybe need to clean out. And you might be able to do it on your own. You might be able to sit there and go, oh, you're right. There is this spot that I've been so much time dealing with the things that I can see that I have forgotten about, the things that I have not seen. And it might be something that might be a little bit difficult to open up, but once you do, it might actually stop setting off all of those personal smoke detectors.

So I encourage you to do that. If there's something in your life that is continually going off and your neighbors are sitting there wondering why something about your daily routine is causing such egregious alarm, go ahead and find that and see if it goes. I do tell you this, that I am not opposed to using all of the great aggressive chemicals that I use. But I'm glad that hopefully I can go back to using some of the lightweight ones, like a little vinegar and something else that is not so harmful to my personal environment.

And so maybe that means looking a little deeper and not letting things crust up as much as I had. And that's a lot of what we do here in the Cadre sphere is hopefully help you find those nooks and crannies so that they don't get as in disrepair and as dirty as they could. And we do it in a variety of different ways. That's one of the wonderful things about the Cadre sphere is that we have a variety of contributors that are helping you tackle some of these cleaning projects from a variety of different angles, and also reminding you that there are lots of different ways and angles to get at things sometimes.

And also reminding you that the project that you have may be different from day to day. That's why we have people like me that talk about things from the perspective of a caregiver. We have people that talk about grief, we have people that talk about recovery, we have people that talk about self care, all of these different things because we know that you might be in a different place day to day and moment to moment in your journey. So that is what we do here and that is why we are so grateful for having all of you continue to join us.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to finish up a project in the bucket of controlling what I can control today in order to leave space for the inevitable, uncontrollable things that are going to continue to show up in life, as I'm sure you are all going to do. So in the interim, please continue to showcase what we have going on here in the Cadresphere by communicating with us, letting us know if there's anything that we could do to continue to support and amplify what it is that you need. You can always drop it in the chat if you're watching us in the replay.

We always appreciate that as well. And let us know if there's anything that we can do to make things a little bit more community driven for you, because that's what we do here in the Cadre sphere. So everyone be well for the rest of the week. Enjoy all of the content that we have here. Reach out if you need to. Take a deep breath, as Jule said, and breathe in lots of good and breathe out lots of bad. So I adore everyone out there. Stay safe, stay healthy and I'll see you next week.