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Apr. 16th, 2008 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoweeHmm. What is a nice segue into this?
Oh. How about this?
Firemen are so nice! As they were putting out our fire, a couple of them actually took a moment to move our new computer out of the room where they were going to tear into the walls and ceiling and start dousing with water.
Or we could try this. My cage location has moved to my mother's house. It will probably be a few weeks before it returns home.
I haven't checked the computer yet. I'm not emotionally prepared to handle it if it's dead. For voyeurs and myself:
I was in a nice little slumber when I heard the fire alarm. As soon as I woke I smelled smoke and realized that I had smelled it in my dreams, but didn't register it as real. I looked into the hall, but saw nothing. Then I saw that tell-tale amber flashing through the blinds. I thought at first that a neighbour's house must have been on fire and the smoke came into our house and set off the alarm because surely it wasn't our house. Meanwhile I'm pulling back the blinds. I see flames on our deck below.
Now the adrenaline makes things a bit fuzzy, but I remember myself next in the hallway saying "Fire" and hearing husband waking. Next I'm in Toria's room yanking her arm hard and pulling on her robe. She' still asleep. I'm telling her "Wake up. Come on. I'm not kidding." Who is kidding when they are throwing a robe on their kid at 2:30 on the morning? Next words I remember are the ones telling Scott to dial 911. I have a flash of us running down the stairs.
Next I'm standing at the door yelling "Koomer! Stanley! Gwennie!" Koomer, God love him, comes running down the stairs. He gets as far as the front door, realizes something is wrong with this picture; we are calling him to go outside? Into the night? We never let him go out anymore and never have let him out at night. What is this trick? He panics. I see him turn toward the kitchen (at the back of the house where the deck is on fire) so I grab him by the tail and yank him out.
No sign of the other two cats; which keeps us plenty worried later.
So I take Toria out to the street. First the police arrive. They ask Scott to move our car from the driveway. As soon as he does, I take Toria and Koomer and we go sit in it. I go back and forth, but I'm mostly out of the picture from this point on because I don't want Toria to be alone or scared. After a little while, Scott called my mom to come get us so we could take Toria to her house to sleep. She did, a little, but was terribly worried about the cats and her frog - yes the one we got at the fair last year -- the one I thought wouldn't live more than a few months.
Anyway, so I'm in charge of the kid, hubby is handling the fire end of things. It was electrical. Fire marshall couldn't say why it had started, only where. Nothing seemed unusual. It just happened. They got the fire out, but shortly after, they saw smoke. It had started burning between the walls of each half of the townhouse. This meant they had to pull away walls to get to it. Finally got it out. The damage, for the record is "significant", but not severe. A small fire, but huge to us, of course.
The next day we found a cat hiding under the sink, no surprise. Gwennie proved to be more of a problem. We hunted the house (freaking out a little, I might add) before she started to cry. It was such a sad cry! When we finally found her, she wouldn't come out and she was so tucked away behind storage boxes that it took hubby and I 10 minutes to get her out.
The poor little ones are separated during this time. My mom has two cats of her own so we couldn't have them all here and... well, it seems to be working out the way we have it. Sounds like 3-4 weeks before we can move back in and start the cosmetic stage of repair.
Oh, and the frog is no longer Sally. I have renamed her the Unsinkable Molly Frog. That poor little thing was in the kitchen, just a few feet from the corner where the fire blazed, her tank covered in smoke (getting that tank with a top to keep the cats out seems even better now!) and she lives on to tell the tale.
Yesterday I found out things like one of the firefighters had cats so he looked for them on the walk-through and let us know that he had seen them, but couldn't get near them. I noticed when I saw the house that they had moved things, even taking my insignificant pictures off the kitchen wall and setting them aside before they moved the table to get into the walls. I didn't even care about our stuff. One doesn't at a time like that, but even now I'm not feeling particularly attached (except I would sure miss you guys if the computer were lost...) The firefighters, though, took some consideration that we would have to rebuild our lives after this incident.
Walking into the house, the first things I thought were things like it being frozen in time. I could look around and remember exactly what were doing just before bed. It will be frozen like that for a while - and in my mind perhaps permanently. Telling Toria she could leave her new birthday toys in the living room becomes a sudden blessing (oh yeah, and there was the fireman who said to hubby "I'm really sorry. I think I broke one of your daughter's toys getting into the basement!". They were all just so considerate and careful.)
Cleaning up from this will be the part that will probably start to make me really irritated. Everything smells, but fortunately since the bulk of the fire was wood and not furniture, we smell like campfire. Anyone who has smelled a housefire with burning furniture and appliances knows what a blessing it is to smell strongly of campfire.
Additionally, my dad got out of hospital yesterday. His biopsy came back negative and except for the part where he doesn't know how to take it easy, he seems - improved at the very least. I hope the stress of this fire doesn't cause trouble.
Oh. How about this?
Firemen are so nice! As they were putting out our fire, a couple of them actually took a moment to move our new computer out of the room where they were going to tear into the walls and ceiling and start dousing with water.
Or we could try this. My cage location has moved to my mother's house. It will probably be a few weeks before it returns home.
I haven't checked the computer yet. I'm not emotionally prepared to handle it if it's dead. For voyeurs and myself:
I was in a nice little slumber when I heard the fire alarm. As soon as I woke I smelled smoke and realized that I had smelled it in my dreams, but didn't register it as real. I looked into the hall, but saw nothing. Then I saw that tell-tale amber flashing through the blinds. I thought at first that a neighbour's house must have been on fire and the smoke came into our house and set off the alarm because surely it wasn't our house. Meanwhile I'm pulling back the blinds. I see flames on our deck below.
Now the adrenaline makes things a bit fuzzy, but I remember myself next in the hallway saying "Fire" and hearing husband waking. Next I'm in Toria's room yanking her arm hard and pulling on her robe. She' still asleep. I'm telling her "Wake up. Come on. I'm not kidding." Who is kidding when they are throwing a robe on their kid at 2:30 on the morning? Next words I remember are the ones telling Scott to dial 911. I have a flash of us running down the stairs.
Next I'm standing at the door yelling "Koomer! Stanley! Gwennie!" Koomer, God love him, comes running down the stairs. He gets as far as the front door, realizes something is wrong with this picture; we are calling him to go outside? Into the night? We never let him go out anymore and never have let him out at night. What is this trick? He panics. I see him turn toward the kitchen (at the back of the house where the deck is on fire) so I grab him by the tail and yank him out.
No sign of the other two cats; which keeps us plenty worried later.
So I take Toria out to the street. First the police arrive. They ask Scott to move our car from the driveway. As soon as he does, I take Toria and Koomer and we go sit in it. I go back and forth, but I'm mostly out of the picture from this point on because I don't want Toria to be alone or scared. After a little while, Scott called my mom to come get us so we could take Toria to her house to sleep. She did, a little, but was terribly worried about the cats and her frog - yes the one we got at the fair last year -- the one I thought wouldn't live more than a few months.
Anyway, so I'm in charge of the kid, hubby is handling the fire end of things. It was electrical. Fire marshall couldn't say why it had started, only where. Nothing seemed unusual. It just happened. They got the fire out, but shortly after, they saw smoke. It had started burning between the walls of each half of the townhouse. This meant they had to pull away walls to get to it. Finally got it out. The damage, for the record is "significant", but not severe. A small fire, but huge to us, of course.
The next day we found a cat hiding under the sink, no surprise. Gwennie proved to be more of a problem. We hunted the house (freaking out a little, I might add) before she started to cry. It was such a sad cry! When we finally found her, she wouldn't come out and she was so tucked away behind storage boxes that it took hubby and I 10 minutes to get her out.
The poor little ones are separated during this time. My mom has two cats of her own so we couldn't have them all here and... well, it seems to be working out the way we have it. Sounds like 3-4 weeks before we can move back in and start the cosmetic stage of repair.
Oh, and the frog is no longer Sally. I have renamed her the Unsinkable Molly Frog. That poor little thing was in the kitchen, just a few feet from the corner where the fire blazed, her tank covered in smoke (getting that tank with a top to keep the cats out seems even better now!) and she lives on to tell the tale.
Yesterday I found out things like one of the firefighters had cats so he looked for them on the walk-through and let us know that he had seen them, but couldn't get near them. I noticed when I saw the house that they had moved things, even taking my insignificant pictures off the kitchen wall and setting them aside before they moved the table to get into the walls. I didn't even care about our stuff. One doesn't at a time like that, but even now I'm not feeling particularly attached (except I would sure miss you guys if the computer were lost...) The firefighters, though, took some consideration that we would have to rebuild our lives after this incident.
Walking into the house, the first things I thought were things like it being frozen in time. I could look around and remember exactly what were doing just before bed. It will be frozen like that for a while - and in my mind perhaps permanently. Telling Toria she could leave her new birthday toys in the living room becomes a sudden blessing (oh yeah, and there was the fireman who said to hubby "I'm really sorry. I think I broke one of your daughter's toys getting into the basement!". They were all just so considerate and careful.)
Cleaning up from this will be the part that will probably start to make me really irritated. Everything smells, but fortunately since the bulk of the fire was wood and not furniture, we smell like campfire. Anyone who has smelled a housefire with burning furniture and appliances knows what a blessing it is to smell strongly of campfire.
Additionally, my dad got out of hospital yesterday. His biopsy came back negative and except for the part where he doesn't know how to take it easy, he seems - improved at the very least. I hope the stress of this fire doesn't cause trouble.
