Fire!!!!

Wow!! These last few days have been a whirlwind of activity. Saturday Ben and Sharley headed back to college, Monday, Brandon, Serene and Sydney flew home from Alaska, Tuesday, Alex and Sarah started school and we helped Brandon and his family move into their apartment in Malibu and right now we're packing getting ready to take Alycia up to Salt Lake City for college. I am thoroughly exhausted. As I said earlier, Sarah and I shared a birthday since we won't be here on her birthday (Sunday) and we decided to wait for Brandon and his family for mine. My birthday dinner on Sunday was roast beef and Sarah's birthday dinner Monday was lasagna. She is a major pasta girl. You'll never guess what my main birthday present is, I got a lot of them but the best one is a balloon ride. I guess the 50 helium balloons in my office should have been a clue. They were enough to almost get me off the ground. I also got a book about Henry Eyreng from Ben and Sharley. That man was an amazing man and some of the things I was taught in Chemistry were his idea's. A balloon ride from the family, a steak dinner at Outback from Sarah (can't wait to use that one), a cool San Diego shirt from Alycia (I'm wearing it in the pictures), a DVD from Craig and a bunch of really cool cards. You can get some pretty fancy cards when you turn fifty. Sarah did well too but I think her best present was this pretty little wooden heart that her dad carved for her out of a stick. Yesterday I got up early and went to pick up Brandon's moving van. We'd ordered a ten footer but as luck would have it they didn't have one. It is so frustration when they do that. They were going to make phone calls all over town and try and find one but we were rushed and I saw a big truck in the lot. I asked if we could have it for the same price. He gave it to us. It was twenty four feet long. Huge. I was worried about getting everything in the ten footer and rightly so. We didn't have a whole lot of empty space in the big van. After many delays that I won't go into we finally started packing Brandon's life's possessions in the van at about 2:00pm. By the time we got up to Malibu it was 7:30pm. What a beautiful school Pepperdine is. The picture of the ocean was taken from Brandon's law school. To make it better his apartment is directly across the street from the law school. It is literally a two minute walk from his front door to the law school. His apartment is also a very nice place. There is only one thing wrong with it. When I parked the van on the street his apartment is the farthest from the van as you can get. It is on the far end of the building on the third floor. We were dripping wet with sweat by the time we were done. We then put the crib together and then started on his bed. One of the reasons we were so late is because we made a shopping trip to Ikea for a bed (and more). I would have guessed that the bed would take an hour to put together, try three hours with all four of us working on it. What a night mare. It was after 2:00am before we had their bed made. They tried talking us into spending the night but I knew Lisa would not do well on the couch so we gassed up the big truck ($100) and dropped it off and then headed south to San Diego. We crawled (literally) into bed at 4:30 this morning. We then got up at 5:30 and got the kids up for school. The plan was to go to bed early tonight so I won't fall asleep driving to Utah tomorrow.

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One of the coolest things about Rosemary is the burning barrel. To save cost in hauling garbage you are not only encouraged but rather you are required to burn your garbage. To a pyro like myself that is pure joy. Of course, this much burning doesn't come without some hazards. My first set back was when we still lived in Bassano. The screen that covers the barrel to keep ashes from flying had been hanging down the side of the barrel and I hadn't noticed that it was leaning right against the side of the barrel and was very hot. I foolishly grabbed the screen to put it on top of the barrel and received the worst burn of my life. My skin was instantly branded and burned so bad that I didn't even feel it. It only took a minute or two before the pain took over. It hurt extremely bad and I could only stand it if I had a bag of ice on my hand. That afternoon we were at the Hall's and Elna cut up a few leaves from her Aloe Vera plant and laid them across my burn. She then wrapped it in a gauze. It was a true miracle. The pain was worse than if I had ice on my hand but it was bearable whereas before it was truly unbearable. I left the Aloe on overnight and the next day I had no blisters and very little pain. I am now a true believer in Aloe Vera. What a wonderful plant.

Several years later I was fulfilling my husbandly duties of taking the garbage out in the morning on my way to work. Lisa had no trouble getting me to take out the garbage in Rosemary, now she has to hound me mercilessly before I take the garbage out. So I set the garbage on fire and headed on into work. As I said, this was in the spring. The snow was mostly melted and the grass hadn't started to grow so it was very dry. At some point some burning garbage fell out of the burning barrel onto the ground. The grass was short so it didn't start on fire but it did smolder. It took hours but finally the smoldering grass made it's way over to my storage shed which was at the back of the yard and sadly the shed finally caught on fire. This was about noon when this happened. Let me give a sample of some of the things that I kept in my shed. Five gallon can of gasoline, 20 pound bottle of propane, about ten 1 pound bottles of propane, a case of motor oil and I think you can get the picture. I am told that you could see the flames from Rod and JoAnne Dycks house out on the highway (2 - 3 miles away). You could see smoke from Duchess (about ten miles away). Lisa called me at work in near panic. I guess the heat was so intense that the neighbors wanted her out of the house for fear it would start on fire. The shed was at least a hundred feet away but I guess a bottle of propane is quite spectacular when it blows. My kids were all at school and you can imagine the excitement the kids at school had during recess. My kids were famous once they figured out it was my shed burning. The heat was so intense that even the aluminum from my bikes and ladders all burned, there was nothing left. I had a root cellar underneath the shed and by the time I got home from work the shed and all of its contents had fallen into the root cellar and the whole ash pile was pretty much level with the ground. The most surprising thing about it all is when we sat down with the insurance adjuster (I believe it was Mr Forest). We added up the replacement cost of everything that I'd lost and it came to over $10,000. If you'd asked me I would have guessed it all at maybe $3,000. The one thing I couldn't replace though was my moose antlers. I had a really nice rack and it was gone. The other sad thing is that the tree next to the shed was half dead. It looked really funny when the tree finally budded out, half the tree was covered with beautiful green leaves and the other half was dead branches without a speck of green on them.

Of course the final humiliation came when I had to go to my next volunteer fire department meeting. They were merciless and teased me relentlessly. My biggest regret is that because I worked in Bassano, I had now missed the second biggest fire that happened in the ten years I lived in Rosemary, my own shed.