Well, At Least It's Not Boring

Had a bit of excitement here at Chez Necessity this week. We own an apartment in a co-op building, and about 4 years ago we had a pretty major fire in the building. It happened at around 9:00 at night, the kids were asleep, and when I looked out our window I saw firemen running across the street with hoses. Running with hoses is never good, so we grabbed the kids and the dog and got out. I, of course, had decided to take an early shower and get into pajamas. Nothing more fun than standing on the street with all your neighbors wearing pajamas while every single other adult is wearing actual clothes (or firefighting gear...). It was a major fire, which completely gutted about 7 apartments, but thankfully no one was injured, and miraculously our apartment was spared - we didn't even have smoke damage.

After the fire, as one can imagine, everyone was a bit on edge, and there were lots of false alarms which required everyone to exit the building, probably around 7 or 8 times. I've finally gotten to the point where my heart doesn't start racing when I hear firetrucks on the street (a rather frequent occurrence, as we live on a busy street near about 7o fire stations), so imagine the jumps my heart took when, on Tuesday night, I looked out the window and saw a fire truck pulled up in front of the building. Of course it was night, and the kids were already in bed. We got their shoes (and my purse - didn't bring it during the real fire, and learned to always bring your purse) and as the firefighters were evacuating us, we quickly removed ourselves.

Turns out there was a gas smell in the hall, so the firefighters were called. They finally found the leak, and it turns out it was very small and of no danger at all. Excellent.

And then, somebody went across the street to get a piece of pizza, and reported that he smelled gas across the street. This caused the firefighters to throw up their hands and glance heavenward (neither of which I enjoy seeing firefighters doing) and they headed across the street. It was eventually decided that all was well with our building, and we brought our sleepy kids (actually, I was a whole lot more sleepy than they were) inside.

Today, the street looks like this:

Yup, that's a big old whole in the middle of the street with a worker standing in it. Guess our little problem helped find a slightly bigger one!