Fire

Fire is pretty -- until it is ON YOUR HOUSE.

Most of the house is ok, though heavily smoked. The back room, however, is toast. We lost our PC and iMac, as well as all our software. Some stuff that is irreplaceable is gone, like my Steel Battalion game and so forth, but that's just stuff.

Of more import is that my one remaining keepsake of my mother was in that room, and is most likely gone now. There is a tiny chance I moved it to a cabinet, and if so it might be there, but the odds are not good. We lost some baby stuff that was still back there, but not much. I lost all my Galactica stuff, including, dammit, a few presents I loved.

We lost our Ikea desks that we both loved. We lost a hundred-year-old rolltop desk. We might have lost our wedding album with the pictures of all the guests. But again, as important as some of it was, it's just stuff.

We're both alive, and the baby is safe in Elli still, and the cats are alive, if currently in the Vet's office. We have plans for our recovery.

Thanks be to the Nine that we got Renter's Insurance a week before.

As to what happened, we don't really know yet. The fire appears to have begun in a tree (possibly sparked by an electric wire hooked to a neighbor's house, but that's unofficial), spread to the garage, and then to the back room.

Bottom line: We're ok. To those who've offered help, or even sympathy: Thank you. To those who are finding this now and will no doubt offer help or sympathy: Thank you, too. We don't deserve friends like you.

For now, any good thoughts/prayers/requests to the universe to make sure our cats recover would be appreciated.

Oh, who am I kidding? Yes we do.