You get to drink from.... THE FIRE HOSE!!!!

Updates, updates, updates....

Just 8 short days after having our hot water cut off, we are now once again in the money, the hot water money, that is. It came on again as a lukewarm trickle this morning, and has been slowly heating all day. Normally this would be cause for celebration.

However,

As we sat back enjoying Jenn's first day of Not School this summer, we heard an unusual sound coming from the hallway. Sirens. Klaxons. Fire Alarms. Not to put too fine a point on it, the building was on fire.

Happily, some forethought had gone into this, since we had a rabid paranoia about fire at our old wood-frame, smoking-encouraged, bad-wiring building. Our insurance contact information, CDs of all our pictures, and a copy of my thesis are in a steel box on an easy-to-access shelf in the office. The cat carriers, somehow, had managed to become disassembled, however, which led to our running down the stairs with cats under our arms and a box in the other hand, tossing the whole mixture into the back of the truck once we got outside, and sat chatting about previous fires in the building with elderly residents as sirens approached. I heard of the time one complete unit burned out, but as a concrete building, every wall is a fire wall, and therefore one unit can burn to a cinder and not damage its neigbour but for the smoke.

As it turned out, this fire was on 18 - a byproduct of repairs being made involving heat guns to dry drywall patching in a unit that had been damaged by the exploding hot-water system. To celebrate the fact that the building has not burned down, I will go have a nice hot shower. In my own apartment. For a change.