The Worst Birthday Yet.

Let me start by saying that we are all fine.  And I'm trying to face this with humor.   And Jeffrey sent me flowers for my birthday.

Last Friday night/Saturday morning, about 45 minutes after Ryan and Mark went to bed, they heard noises in the attic, as if someone were throwing things around.  And then they smelled smoke.

"The house is on fire!  The f**ing house is on fire!"  The terror in Ryan's voice chilled me far worse than the words.  I can't fix terror in my kids; everything else can be handled.

I ordered the boys outside, walked to the phone, called 911, gathered my purse, keys and lockbox (why lose the house deed and birth certificates?), and coats for everyone.  Within 4 minutes, our cop was on the scene (we only have 3 cops in town, so we think of them as "ours"), 5 minutes later the first ladder truck arrived, and the party started.  All told, we had 8 companies, one ladder truck with a 5" line, 3 running 3" lines, and about 50 people.

We lost part of the attic.

The fire fighters moved most of our things out of the line of fire and water.  They tarped what they couldn't move.  There are 3 bedrooms upstairs which look like this:

The ground floor is half soaked and blackened; the rest is clean.  There's a lot of extra stuff in the room where my daughter was married just 3 weeks earlier.  Stuff I don't have to replace.  Score one for us good guys.

We have a seasonally appropriate "Haunted House" look.

The things we lost in the fire are corralled in a seasonally appropriately colored dumpster.

Some surprises came from the attic, like these people from our Christmas train set.  They will be scattered around in the playroom for decoration, as a reminder of what we could have lost.

I spent last Saturday and Sunday cleaning my kitchen, sweeping away the 2" of standing water, throwing away that which got soaked, cleaning all of my surfaces a hundred times each (gotta love those disposable wipes; I've used about a case of them), laundering dish towels and cloths dozens of times, and getting ready to feed us.  One of our neighbors brought us coffee and donuts at 9AM Saturday; another brought us dinner late Saturday afternoon.  I was very touched.

My dearly beloved already had a demolition crew arranged to start on Monday morning; they put the tarps on the roof (keeping out the 3" of rain we got Wednesday), and they have the attic cleared, the undamaged section cleaned and repainted, and we are ready for the framing crew to come in and start next Monday.

So I'll only be around sporadically.  But please know that we are all a little shaken, but physically just fine, and recovering.  The things we lost in the fire?  Not much.  The things which were saved from the fire?  Priceless.