Four Years Ago

I thought about posting about this for a while this week and I have been undecided. I've been sorta bummed out about it and thus the dearth of writing, but any way...here goes.

I grew up around fire. My family had a fireplace in our basement that we used regularly for heat and to provide "atmosphere" to our evening socializing. We had central heat and ultimately added a central air conditioning unit in the late 1960's, but the fireplace was a major feature of our home as I grew up.

My mother's father's house had three fireplaces, the house being built in the 1930's by hand from lumber cut and sawn off of his farm. As a child I remember the cold nights and the primary fireplace in his family room being a source of heat and community gathering when the family was there together.

I went camping with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and a friend of mine was the designated "troupe arson" because Mickey could light a fire better than anyone we knew. Fire is your friend when you are a kid and you're camping out and you need to get warm or cook dinner or need something to goof around with--within certain limitations.

I had a fireplace in my first two houses. I also had a chainsaw and I cut wood and stoked those fireplaces full and loved every minute of it until 1994. That was the year that I gave my ex-wife my second house and the fireplace. She could have cared less about my fireplace--but I loved it.

I have lived without my own fireplace ever since. I had a house since then, but I didn't have a fireplace...and I had a fire, and that caused a big problem. You see, I bought my third house in the summer of 1997 and happily lived there after my divorce until April 5, 2001 when I came home from work and my house had burned up.

If you have never experienced a house fire on an up close and personal basis, I hope you never have to because there is no way for you to understand what happens to your life. There was a police tape wrapped around it and there was water running down the driveway and almost everything I owned except my Snapper mower and my Webber Charcoal grill and my Nissan Maxima and the Chevy Suburban that I happened to be driving that day was toast.

Worst of all, the police want to talk to you and treat you like some kind of criminal because YOU are the number one suspect when your house burns down. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the cause of my fire was obvious--a crappy, cheep, surge suppressor/power strip on my fancy smancy 110 watt per channel Bose surround sound TV system.

Never again.

Go in your home office, go in your bedrooms, go in your living rooms, and look at what you have plugged into the surge protectors and wall outlets. Do you have an "octopus" of electrical wires? DO YOU WANT TO COME HOME AND FIND YOUR FRONT DOOR CHOPPED IN AND POLICE TAPE ACROSS YOUR FRONT PORCH? Do you want to see everything you've worked for, possibly your plants and your pets, cooked into ashes?

No?

Then think about what you are connecting to the electrical circuits in your house and get some help if you have any doubts and don't end up like me that day, moving into a motel room, dragging along what few of your possessions you can scrounge out of the rubble, smelling of smoke and dripping soot and water, stinking up your car parked out in the parking lot.

It really sucks......don't let it happen to you...

OK?