first – saturday morning, kevin awoke to a mouse face on the kitchen floor, with an accompanying pile of entrails. mouse face number one of the weekend.
then – after fencing, a few of us were sitting outside at el presidente downtown and eventually most of the people left, and it was just me and kevin and jonelle and her son freddie. a firetruck whizzed by and freddie ran up to look at it which i thought was odd, because freddie is 14, it’s not like he’s never seen one before.
but then we all got up, because across the street at maldaner’s restaurant, flames were shooting out of the building! the firetruck wasn’t whizzing by, it was stopping right there, and it was followed by a few more firetrucks and we watched as the flames continued to lick the really old building and the firemen went about trying to put it out.
i think the date on the top of the building says 1894. it’s OLD. was sat on a bench and watched the firemen work and it was quite fascinating. smoke kept pouring out from behind the copper decorative work around the windows, as jonelle said that she had seen it start – a guy was doing some work on the building with a blowtorch, and then she noticed the flames and wondered why they were coming out, and saw him stuff some material in the hole. and the of course the firetrucks came because no, it wasn’t supposed to be flaming.
they had to break off a lot of the copper, and some of the firemen were inside the building poking their heads out, and sometimes they wore their masks because there was quite a bit of smoke. we probably sat there for an hour, just watching, and when a tv reporter finally showed up we told freddie to go tell her that his mom has seen it start. he did, and the woman interviewed jonelle, but they only used one little snippet of the interview, the part where she said the fire department did a good job of putting out the fire.
quite an exciting saturday afternoon.
sunday morning, the second mouse face. except this time it was the whole head. plus more entrails.
and then, sunday afternoon, we did lots of work on the pontoon boat. lots of scrubbing and scraping and trying to get all the caked-on stuff off the pontoons. it was hard work, but at least the weather was perfect.
amy and i left for a while to go hear mom in a flute choir performance, and when we got back there was smoke coming out of the box in front of the boat, the box that david had neatly stacked the pieces of flooring and chairs that he’d chain-sawed into small pieces. “isn’t there a law against burning stuff in your front yard?” i asked amy.
it wasn’t supposed to be burning, you see. the neighbor girl jennifer was hanging out watching david and kevin work, and pretty soon she said, “is that box supposed to be on fire?”
NO. kevin was going to put it out with the hose, apparently, but the flames were too high, so he had to use the fire extinguisher.
amy and i missed it all, except for the lingering smouldering.
today, monday, things are more quiet. no mouse parts of any kind this morning, nothing on fire.
whew.
ok then,
monday grace.