Exciting night in the bedroom!

No, you dirty, dirty readers, not exciting like that. Exciting like this:



I know, it's really hard to see that this is a firetruck outside our house at 5am this morning. It was a fairly stormy weekend in Vancouver with two days of wet snow that turned to heavy rain Sunday evening. Pretty mucky out there and surprisingly cold too with temperatures feeling like -9 at one point. I know that means absolutely nothing to the rest of the nation, but it was not usual for these parts.

So last night we're snoozing away to the sound of heavy rain and a bit of wind, when I kind of slowly wake up to an intermittent noise that I can't place. It's a kind of whump or deep hum sound happening every minute or so and lasting a couple seconds. I climb out of bed to look out the bedroom window, hoping to identify the sound. Nothing...nothing...whump! What? Is that sparking? ...whump! Oh my god the shed is sparking and fizzling! Behind the main house there is a large shed that used to be a garage. The landlords use it as a large workroom now with fancy power tools, and they also carved out a storage space for us where we keep our bikes and other odds and ends. The sparks are coming from the bottom of the door to our storage compartment. And they're getting worse!

I wake Rocco up and we both freak out a little then grab the phone and call the landlords downstairs. They had heard the noise too but don't have a window in their apartment that looks out back that way. Keeping an eye on the phenomenon, it seems like the sparking has started little flames that hang about for a few seconds then get doused by the heavy rain. The landlords call the fire department and the truck arrives really quickly, in minutes. Three firefighters go around to the shed - and here's where all the excitement dissipates, really quickly - they look inside the storage room, they look outside the storage room, one firefighter kicks the bottom of the shed where it was sparking, and they leave. It turns out there is an exposed wire at the bottom of the door to our storage room and it was shorting in the rain. So freaky!

Anyway, the landlord cut the power to the shed before the firetruck arrived so there really wasn't anything else to see. They'll get the situation repaired and there's essentially no damage except a small bit of charring on the outside of the door frame, but it was definitely scary for a while when all I knew was that the large wooden structure immediately behind our house was sparking and trying to flame up. We were both dressed in warm clothes by the time the truck came, I had an emergency bag packed with some food and juice boxes, toques and mitts, umbrellas and reading material, and the cat carrier was out and ready to go next to our raincoats by the door.

5:20am and we were back in bed trying to get back to sleep as the cats were slowly emerging from deep under the bed where they cowered after we managed to freak them out with our own worry. Like I said, an exciting night in the bedroom!