There was a fire at 3:30am this morning 6 doors down from us, totally destroyed the house. Luckily, my friend and I were both up watching Chappelle’s Show when our neighbor started screaming and banging on everyone’s door.
I ran upstairs before I knew what the situation was and stuffed Plato (one of my cats) into his kennel and brought him outside. I saw the fire was close, but didn’t really stop to count how many doors was between us and it.
My other cat, Lydia, was no where to be found. After looking for almost an hour, breathing in smoke heavily (I had the front door open like an idiot) I was told it wasn’t going to make it to our house so we all calmed down. 3 hours later we went back inside and I still couldn’t find her anywhere.. I remembered there was a hole in the wall above the washing machine that I had TOLD Alberto to cover (“The cats aren’t that stupid”) I peeked in side the hole with a flashlight and saw Lydia at the bottom of the wall, scared shitless. I reached in the hole as far as I could and she licked my fingers, then rose up and rubbed my hand with the back of her neck. I grabbed her by the scruff and drug the bitch up and out. I have a huge honkin bruise on my arm now, but she’s worth it. :)
I’m TOTALLY neurotic about my cats… I’m just calming down enough that my hands aren’t shaking and I can type something.
The house that burned was known to be crackhouse by most of the people on the block. It wasn’t abandoned, but it had no electricity or gas.
I’m feeling really lucky this morning.
I was too freaked out about my babies to get any pics during the blaze, but I managed to stitch together this panorama from some pictures I took after the fact:
