Merry Christmas!
So, let's see what we did for Christmas.
Christmas Eve we went out to the Pomeroy House, a restaurant my mom loved, and had a really good dinner.
Christmas, I worked. For like ten hours. My back is killing me, and my knee, and I'm not sure I made as much money as I really would have liked. But family was at home when I got back, and I made myself a massive gin and tonic and had some nice dinner, and PECAN PIE. Score!
I got two Wii games - Metroid Prime 3 and Twilight Princess. Now I just have to get a Wii. EASIER SAID THAN DONE D:
The next morning, this morning, my house burnt down.
Seriously.
I wake up at 6 AM to pounding on my door and a shout. I go back to sleep because that's what I do. Another pound and I hear "FIRE" or something and I grab my robe and go. Smoke all up in our family room and all. We dash out the back (me in nothing but my bathrobe and no shoes. It was FUCKING COLD) with the dog. Coming around the back of the house, we can hear the roar, hear the awful popping, cracking sounds (imagine the popping of a firelog in your fireplace. That is a cap gun. Now imagine standing a block away from a MOAB detonating. The scale of the sound and the horror it instills are adequately analagous). We can see the orange light flickering awfully against the neighbor's house and against the sky itself.
Pounding on the neighbor's door, we watch it burn. The van is engulfed in flame. Any window it can reach, it already has, and fire reaches out from the portals as from Hell itself. Check out that simile. That's fucking original right there. We get inside as the police and fire arrive, and are there just long enough to sit down before we have to move again - both adjacent houses are being evacuated, as the car is an explosion risk. We go to the next house down, now numbering seven and two dogs, and there we wait.
The car does not explode, and the fire is put out. The garage is completely destroyed, along with everything in it. This includes dad's van, which is van-ish slag metal that looks as it belongs roadside in Iraq. The other three cars were in the driveway, and other than some trivial body trim melting on one (frightening in its implications of the heat and its power and reach more than in the effect), they are unharmed. The contents of our garage also including our rabbit's hutch. He is no more, and we can only hope that he was unconscious from the smoke long before any fire was able to harm him.
The front doors and their glass sides, the front bushes, and the windows in the garage, as well as a few on the front of the house, are destroyed. There is terrible burning in the laundry room(which is off the garage), and we are lucky that the fire was stopped there, because if it had reached into the family room just beyond that last door, all bets would indeed have been off.
The siding above the garage, exterior my sisters' rooms, are melted and stripped clean off. Their windows shattered. The heat in the upper floor cause all of the ceiling to collapse.
However, in all of this, we are extremely lucky. Myself in particular. My room shares a wall with the garage. If that firewall had not held up astonishingly well, I may well be dead. They say the fire may have been burning for as many as two hours judging by the warping, but it held. My room is actually one of the most intact in the entire house, the basement being the only one better off. There is smoke damage all throughout, not to mention ashes and cinders everywhere. But besides my room, the bathroom adjacent, the family room, living room, kitchen and dining room are remarkably well preserved. Smoke damage and aforementioned ash and cinder notwithstanding, they are in working order. Upstairs, very little of the fire made its way inside, if any at all. Besides the collapsed ceiling, and the exterior damage, those rooms too (especially the master bedroom at the back of the house) are in good shape. All things considered.
If we had not woken up sooner (my sister is awoken by "a smell" moments before the alarms go off, we could have been much worse off. If the fire had burned any longer, it stands a very good chance of having reached the interior of the house, and as I said before, we would be in a very different situation. The dog was not closed in the laundry room for the night; were he, he may have died. We all escaped safely, barring the rabbit; even the bird is unmolested by flame and smoke alike. We lost a lot, but it was all Stuff. Just Stuff. Replaceable. And we lost far less than we could have, including our selves. All told, we were extremely lucky in a number of ways.
The house is extremely unlivable. We are in a hotel for a night or two, and then will live in a rental in town for the four or more months that it will take to repair the house. I am using a friend's computer, and after this, I will not have reliable access to the Internet for some time.
I am all right. We are all right. Tired, fatigued, exhausted; downtrodden. It's been a fucking hell of a year. Merry Christmas.
Christmas Eve we went out to the Pomeroy House, a restaurant my mom loved, and had a really good dinner.
Christmas, I worked. For like ten hours. My back is killing me, and my knee, and I'm not sure I made as much money as I really would have liked. But family was at home when I got back, and I made myself a massive gin and tonic and had some nice dinner, and PECAN PIE. Score!
I got two Wii games - Metroid Prime 3 and Twilight Princess. Now I just have to get a Wii. EASIER SAID THAN DONE D:
The next morning, this morning, my house burnt down.
Seriously.
I wake up at 6 AM to pounding on my door and a shout. I go back to sleep because that's what I do. Another pound and I hear "FIRE" or something and I grab my robe and go. Smoke all up in our family room and all. We dash out the back (me in nothing but my bathrobe and no shoes. It was FUCKING COLD) with the dog. Coming around the back of the house, we can hear the roar, hear the awful popping, cracking sounds (imagine the popping of a firelog in your fireplace. That is a cap gun. Now imagine standing a block away from a MOAB detonating. The scale of the sound and the horror it instills are adequately analagous). We can see the orange light flickering awfully against the neighbor's house and against the sky itself.
Pounding on the neighbor's door, we watch it burn. The van is engulfed in flame. Any window it can reach, it already has, and fire reaches out from the portals as from Hell itself. Check out that simile. That's fucking original right there. We get inside as the police and fire arrive, and are there just long enough to sit down before we have to move again - both adjacent houses are being evacuated, as the car is an explosion risk. We go to the next house down, now numbering seven and two dogs, and there we wait.
The car does not explode, and the fire is put out. The garage is completely destroyed, along with everything in it. This includes dad's van, which is van-ish slag metal that looks as it belongs roadside in Iraq. The other three cars were in the driveway, and other than some trivial body trim melting on one (frightening in its implications of the heat and its power and reach more than in the effect), they are unharmed. The contents of our garage also including our rabbit's hutch. He is no more, and we can only hope that he was unconscious from the smoke long before any fire was able to harm him.
The front doors and their glass sides, the front bushes, and the windows in the garage, as well as a few on the front of the house, are destroyed. There is terrible burning in the laundry room(which is off the garage), and we are lucky that the fire was stopped there, because if it had reached into the family room just beyond that last door, all bets would indeed have been off.
The siding above the garage, exterior my sisters' rooms, are melted and stripped clean off. Their windows shattered. The heat in the upper floor cause all of the ceiling to collapse.
However, in all of this, we are extremely lucky. Myself in particular. My room shares a wall with the garage. If that firewall had not held up astonishingly well, I may well be dead. They say the fire may have been burning for as many as two hours judging by the warping, but it held. My room is actually one of the most intact in the entire house, the basement being the only one better off. There is smoke damage all throughout, not to mention ashes and cinders everywhere. But besides my room, the bathroom adjacent, the family room, living room, kitchen and dining room are remarkably well preserved. Smoke damage and aforementioned ash and cinder notwithstanding, they are in working order. Upstairs, very little of the fire made its way inside, if any at all. Besides the collapsed ceiling, and the exterior damage, those rooms too (especially the master bedroom at the back of the house) are in good shape. All things considered.
If we had not woken up sooner (my sister is awoken by "a smell" moments before the alarms go off, we could have been much worse off. If the fire had burned any longer, it stands a very good chance of having reached the interior of the house, and as I said before, we would be in a very different situation. The dog was not closed in the laundry room for the night; were he, he may have died. We all escaped safely, barring the rabbit; even the bird is unmolested by flame and smoke alike. We lost a lot, but it was all Stuff. Just Stuff. Replaceable. And we lost far less than we could have, including our selves. All told, we were extremely lucky in a number of ways.
The house is extremely unlivable. We are in a hotel for a night or two, and then will live in a rental in town for the four or more months that it will take to repair the house. I am using a friend's computer, and after this, I will not have reliable access to the Internet for some time.
I am all right. We are all right. Tired, fatigued, exhausted; downtrodden. It's been a fucking hell of a year. Merry Christmas.