yesterday we spent the day in conway at a family reunion (you know, that thing that rednecks do in order to have an extra reason to eat kfc and assorted casseroles…) and we decided to dump lucy off with the parentals before heading back to the rock. so we went out for dinner and a movie (the happening, specifically…more on that in a later post…) and got home at about 11:45 p.m. we walked in the front door and immediately smelled and saw smoke throughout the house.

after the ‘oh crap’ (or whatever words may have come abundantly flowing from our mouths…) moment subsided, we quickly investigated and found that the brunt of and the source of the smoke was lucy’s room! we discovered that it wasn’t any outlets or anything that was our faults, and i determined that it must be coming from some kind of electrical source in the walls. naturally, we called 911 and the call went something like this:

911: 911 emergency.
me: yeah, so we got home and our house was full of smoke…not really thick smoke, but very visible. i think it may be something electrical in the wall…i don’t really think it’s an emergency…but yeah, i know this is an emergency number, but when you go to the little rock fire department website, there’s no number…so, you know, i just called 911 hoping that this would work. so look, if you could just not send the whole big unit with blaring lights and the whole bit, that would be great. just send a couple dudes to check things out…
(name, address, blah blah blah…)
911: thanks, we’re on the way.

(5 minutes later. 12:15 a.m. in a quiet neighborhood….)

approximately 6 full fledged fire trucks screaming down our quiet street, lights blazing, horns blaring. oh crap. as if they were compelled by some kind of force of nature, every door on the whole block comes flinging open with little middle-aged ladies in their night gowns coming to see what’s going on in our house.

so, long story short: they found the almost-to-be fire in lucy’s wall and they quickly gathered their giant manly axes and a couple chainsaws and commenced to wailing away on her wall. turns out that they said they’ve never seen anything like this. in essence, a nail in a board somehow caught an electrical charge, sent sparks flying and a board had been smoldering for a little while. they said that it was probably only 30 minutes or an hour from a complete blaze. the main fireman said that in these types of houses, once a little fire gets going, it’s only a matter of minutes until a major fire breaks out that they have a very difficult time putting out.

so now we have a giant gaping whole in lucy’s wall, a smoky must throughout the house and a room full of sawdust and general grime from the aftermath of flying wood and old house. i wish i would have taken a picture, but i never thought to do it.

there’s our little early morning father’s day saga. pretty exciting. oh yeah, the other great thing is that when it was all said and done, it was approximately 3:30 a.m. and we were informed that we didn’t need to stay in the house. so we drove to my parent’s house in conway and slept on a palette in the floor…..oh the humanity…. ultimately, though, we are thankful that we’re all alive and safe and our house is still standing. major props to the firefighters who were super nice and courteous and took care of the problem immediately.