This just in

10:30pm Dale and I were watching a pretty good movie and there was a sudden noise of rushing water. Nothing in our apartment, thank goodness, but probably a frozen pipe burst somewhere nearby, sure to be a drag for someone. And then the shrieking alarm started to go off.

It continued, and was intolerable, and we went into what-do-we-bring mode. 1. Children. 2. Warm things. 3. Laptops. 4. Wallets, keys. Other than that my mind was a blank. We threw laptops and warm things into bags, woke and dressed the children, and carried them down to the car, because it was 25 degrees outside and we didn't know how long we'd be stuck out there. We considered driving to Bekah and Bob's house, but the roads are very bad. The fire trucks were blocking the driveway, anyhow, so we just stayed there in the car. Randomly, one of the things I happened to stuff into my pocket was the camera, so here's the scene in front of the apartment.


The kids were great. Aaron never missed a beat. Jordan was shaky at first, but soon accepted our assurances. Here they are just hanging out in the car.


We hoped it was just the broken pipe setting off an alarm perhaps because there's a sprinkler system, but of course you never know. And they have to check everything. So we waited a while and chatted with Jordan about all the cool firefighter stuff. He is of course very into all that so it's a great topic of conversation.

After not too long, they let us back in and turned off the very loud alarm, and we got back upstairs and put the kids back to bed. The firefighters had kicked the door in, and in fact had blown the frame right out of the doorway.


In case you want to know, that's apparently quite easy to do. "One swift kick," they said. They came in shortly after we had the kids down and had some work to do in our front bathroom; apparently the busted pipe is right behind our front shower wall. More construction ahead, it seems. (We are the lucky ones, though... the guy below us got all our water in his apartment.) Jordan got up to check out the five firefighters in the bathroom and was thrilled to accept gold badge stickers from them; then he said he wanted to go back to sleep. that's my boy!

The firefighters nailed our door frame sorta back together before they left. They were super nice, as firefighters always seem to be.