Sunday, December 26, 2004

Hey cool for you folks living near Cambridge - Free classes at MIT MIT OpenCourseWare | OCW Home

Saturday, December 25, 2004

more detailed into on corporate political donations - Choose The Blue
more detailed into on corporate political donations - Choose The Blue

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

And for those outdoorsmen...

bumperdumper
Fire

So last week I’m at work building an addition to a house on the Oakland Berkeley border when once again I smelled paper burning. Someone in the neighborhood uses paper to start their fireplace fire pretty frequently. But it persisted and Jessie was like, “dude, the smell is getting stronger.” I was handing him a board or something while he was on the scaffold when I saw a cloud whiz by overhead. Really close overhead.

I ran to the back of the house to see the source and ho damn there is some major smoke coming from a house right down the street. Being the calm cool cat I am I scream hoarsely “Fire!” and drop my tool belt while running out into the street. Lee and Jessie are in tow, on their cell phones.

Three houses over there is a shitload of smoke coming out of a second story window in the back. It’s an old former Victorian turned into a ratty stucco triplex. I’m yelling “Lee, do you have a fire extinguisher in your truck?” I just got a new van and all the gear out of my old truck is still in my garage

The next door neighbor says “I have one.” I grab it of the wall of his garage and run up to the front of the house.

This old woman with singed hair is staggering around saying “It’s my daughter’s place. They’re moving. I called 911.” Meanwhile several people are in the street and they’re all on hold with 911. I run upstairs and it was a sight I’ve only vaguely imagined before. A black cloud you can’t see 2 feet into is in the whole place, with a layer of breathable air maybe 12 inches off the floor. I am not about to risk my life for someone else’s building. Maybe for a kid but definitely not for a cat and honestly not even for a dog.

So I run down again and drag the woman who is trying to come back in out to the street. From the front of the house it’s pretty serious now, big flames shooting out of the windows in back. So I tell the old guy whose fire extinguisher I’m returning that he needs to hose the side of his house down and his roof because his place might catch fire, too. I’ve seen the guy hobble around before but tell you what he hears that and he can move. We’re in the back of his house and the hose on the side with the fire is a mess. We hook up the hose from the front of his house and the stream is weak. It won’t reach his roof, for sure, and ash is landing on it. The flames coming out of the main window with the room on fire are averaging 6, maybe 8 feet. It’s crackling and roaring and flaming lath and other small woodwork are flying out.

I hose the side of the house down and put out the small flames here and there on the rear deck I can’t see over the bushes of the burning house. When my stream hits the stucco of the house it vaporizes. The old man fixes a knot in the hose or something and I get a bit more pressure so I hose down the trees in the back yard. When I run out of stuff to wet down I stream my hose into the window but it’s kind of hopeless. Firemen are arriving and they run to the side of the house where I am yelling “How do we get upstairs?”

I’m yelling “Go to the front of the house, center door” and off they go. This happens with three groups, and after a minute or two suddenly there is major league water blasting in there, shooting holes in the flaming roof, blasting big patches of stucco out at me. I turn off my hose and split.

In the street Jessie is laughing at me. He says my stream looked like a trickle of piss. There are a lot of people around and six fire trucks. The fire is out already so we go back to work.

Later Jessie and I drop by at break time and meet the landlord and the boyfriend of the daughter whose Mom was there for the fire. They think it might have been a cigarette and so I guessing the Mom smoked. The firemen have tossed a ton of burned stuff out of the window and I’m sure the back room is gone and the front rooms have just got to really smell.

On my way home much later I see the old woman sitting on the front steps in a daze. Poor thing. She must have felt terrible. I mean, I know she has to think she started it. If I’d lived nearby I would have asked he in for a cup of tea or something but what can I do? I just drove away.

I really do need to start carrying my digital camera around more often. But I’ll never forget the curtain of black smoke or the fire shooting out of that window.

dude! this list is so wierd, like a lot of the companies I knew I liked I like even more, like Costco, and others I knew were evil like Sears and Walmart sure enough are big republican supporteres. But did you know that Amazon.com is a republican supporter?Buy Blue Current Campaign