Yesterday was a bit of a hectic day.
I woke up to find the apartment building next door was on fire and belching lots of yellow/black smoke.
And by next door I mean "the building on the other side of a six-foor alley from my bedroom window"

The building on the other side suffered some damage to the siding, my apartment building was fine, but only because, quite literally, that's how the wind blows.

After watching the fire departments from several towns work to put out the blaze, and taking several photos, I went into work (I'd already called and let them know I'd be late due to fire). Anyway, I was a little cold from no jacket and my shoes and socks were wet cause I stepped in a small river of runoff. The FD stopped me from going back into the apartment to change, and I didn't argue. I couldn't get to my bag of clothes in case of emergencies that I kept in my trunk cause a firehose was draped over my car.

So I spent the workday barefoot and smelling like I attended an out of control BBQ. And musing on the What Ifs?

I hadn't slept well the night before and opted to skip the gym. Turned out to be a moot decision. The power company cut the power to the area (to protect the power mains that ran by the burning building) and this included my gym.

So I return home, power still not back on, but the fire is out and they're in the process of knocking the building down cause it was a lost cause. I went into my apartment to put on a fresh shirt and fresh socks before heading around to get some more photos and vids of excavators knocking down the remains of the building.

I'd lived in this apartment for two years with my (platonic) friend Ben and the view out of my bedroom window was a covered up window with small holes (venting for a dryer or air conditioner I assumed). And now it's gone.

Watching the excavators...it looked like two predators/scavengers tearing at a large corpse for meat. Noticing a parallel between what used to be a living home with furniture, personal possessions and memories being turned into debris, and a living deer or mammoth being turned into chunks of food. Not saying this in a negative way, I am a wolf after all. Just musing on the impermanence of things.

The power came back on, along with the hallways fire alarms. Part of knocking the building down was to expose hidden sections that were still burning. They did that, and hit them with water, which released a lot more billowing acrid plumes of smoke. Enough to trigger our smoke alarms. The FD came in to reset them, twice.

From what I read in the news, and this isn't 100% confirmed, of the 24 people who lived there, only one person didn't get out, an 89yr old man. Don't know if they determined the cause of the fire yet, but I have a vested interest in finding out.

The whole area smelled like smoke and it was pervasive enough in the apartment and my clothes that my nose really couldn't distinguish how bad it was in each room. We decided to wait on airing the place out until the outside improved a bit.

The street the building was on (our building is on an intersection) was blocked the whole day and night with a fire truck continuing to hose the site down with water and monitoring it for signs of more burning.

I get up this morning, having slept better than I expected, to find the FD advising us to move our cars from the adjacent lot, they were going to bring in a tower truck to continue hosing off the parts of the debris that were still smoldering.

I posted some pics to my Twitter yesterday. I took more last night, along with some short video clips. I haven't decided exactly what I'd do with them, maybe edit together and put on youtube or something.

Physically, me, my roommate and my possessions are fine, apart from a lingering odor of soot.
Mentally I'm just a little tired but otherwise okay. The fire was contained enough that there wasn't a sense of emergency, of an urgency to flee.

I do plan on buying a fire-proof safe to keep important documents and backups of my computer hard drive, it never hurts to plan ahead.