Fire!

The weather broke last week which allowed us to resume work on rescuing the Shanty., or shall I call it the Phoenix.  A mythical bird that rises from the ashes. Hmm. I wonder what could have happened this week.

 

Here is the story-

PJ and I were hard at work catching up on past due chores at the Alvin homestead when she gets a call from one of our Shanty neighbors. The neighbor says our place is on fire and fire trucks are on the way. Panic quickly sets in. PJ might have actually said the “S” word. Oh yeah, the panic was real. The neighbor didn’t have many details. Her house is about a quarter of a mile away from ours and couldn’t quite see what was going on. She promises to call back after she walks across the street to get more info. So at this point we really have no idea what is on fire. We just know there is a lot of smoke and fire trucks are screaming down our street. All sorts of thoughts crossed our minds. Did we just lose the thousands we invested in the rebuild? Did our thousands of hours in labor just go up in smoke? And all those cool new appliances that have been in boxes for months, will I not get to see them installed?

 

We had to wait an agonizing five minutes to find out. In case you are wondering, we do not yet have insurance on the house. You see when we started there just wasn’t much to insure. Obviously that has changed over the last year so I am thinking it’s time we rethink our financial management strategy. Especially after this incident.

 

Enough about finances (boring) back to the story. Paula gets a pic from the neighbor showing a huge grass fire and a burned up side-by-side ATV. Another neighbor, in his quest to leverage his 15 acre pasture to become the hay king of Angelina County, decided to burn his grass on a windy day. Obviously the situation got beyond his capabilities so he had to call in the FD. Once again I owe a debt of gratitude to our First Responders who extinguished the fire before it got to our house. I’m telling you guys if that house would have burned, neighbor would have needed the PD and not the FD to save him. I get it. Fire is a useful tool for pasture management. We used it a bit a few weeks back on one of our fence lines. If you do it you have to have a plan. You have to appreciate what can go wrong and have a plan going in how how to mitigate and recover if the worst happens. Oh well. Stuff happens. Other than my neighbor somehow burning up his side-by-side there was no harm done. With any luck the burn will produce a beautiful pasture that I can enjoy over a cup of coffee this spring. Moving on.

 

HG Portion of our Update-

We got back to a bit of heavy lifting in the living room. We replaced about 100 square feet of termite-eaten floor boards. Such a shame to have to rip out that old pine wood, but it was just too far gone to save. We still have one or two small boards to replace and we will be ready for that fancy new hardwood. Well we still need to finish the sheetrock, paint etc. before we get to the floor in that room, but all the structural work is just about complete.

 

We had a small leak in our water supply line. A threaded connection just wasn’t doing its job. I am really not sure why we are just now having this leak. Looking at the cause I would think it would have happened months ago. Perhaps the freezing weather had something to do with it. Who knows. It was a quick fix and we were back up and running in no time.

 

That’s about it folks. With any luck we will get a bit of sheetrock done next week. Even just a few hours of work each week adds up. Assuming it doesn’t all burn down in a blink of an eye. You guys know my propensity for working in cold weather is to not do it at all. If things don’t warm up, and I don’t get any work done, then next week’s update might be a cool story from one of my ventures down in Mexico. I have a few good ones to share and have one in particular you might enjoy hearing about.

Say a prayer for all the sick. They could use it!