My family had just dropped me off at the garage to pick up my car after it got an oil change, when my cell phone rang. It was my wife letting me know that a truck had just exploded next to her and the boys on the road in front of the shopping center.

She told me they had been stopped at the intersection light when a utilities truck burst into flames right beside her. They could feel the heat from the flames as they sped away. She had called 911 before calling me. “You should take the other way out of the shopping center,” she warned me.

As I was walking out to my car, I saw the black smoke rising above the tall trees around the parking lot and boulevard. I left my car in its parking spot and walked across the lot to the road to see the situation. As I got closer, I could see the orange glow between the tree limbs, and I realized that the fire was bigger than I expected.

I’ve seen one or two car fires before; I’ve even seen a house fire. But when I cleared the trees, and stood about a hundred yards from the utilities truck, I saw the deep orange flames rolling upwards of 100 feet into the sky. Holy moly! I’ve never seen a fire that big.

There was a fire station just up the street from the intersection, and the fire truck and firefighters were already on the scene. Within five minutes of the start, the firefighters had water going on the blaze. In another few minutes, more fire trucks started showing up.

I stood on the street side, with many other gawkers, for about 30 minutes watching the scene. There were two helicopters and a plane circling overhead, and several photographers were capturing the scene for the news. The blaze was huge but I couldn’t tell if the heat I felt was from the fire or from the noon sun. I could smell the gasoline from the burning truck, and I could hear the roar of the water rushing from the fire hoses. The water seemed to be doing absolutely nothing against the fire. The rolling and twisting inferno was hypnotic to watch. At one point, a thin tornado spun off the blaze and twirled off to dissipate in the trees on the side of the road.

I heard the people near me talking about the scene.
“The radio said it was a multi-vehicle accident.”
“If it’s a gas line, why don’t they just turn it off?”
“Was anyone burned?”

When I left, the fire was still raging. In fact, the fire continued for several hours. Workers had been drilling on a concrete median in the intersection and struck a gas line. According to the news, there was no gas line cut-off in the area, so the gas company workers had to literally cut a hole in the road to make a cut-off. All the businesses and stores around the intersection were evacuated, and the area will be shut down for a couple days.

My family, in our van, was about 20 feet away, stopped at a red light when the gas ignited. They felt the heat from inside the van, and when my wife got home, she checked the passenger side for damage (there is none). It was an amazing thing. According to the news, no one was hurt by the fire.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was having new tires put on the family van, so I had a half hour or so to waste. I wandered around the shopping center to see if there was any interesting stores to check out. There were six restaurants, a couple cell phone stores, a wine seller, and a used book store. Since I failed to find Jack Vance at the library a few days ago, and I hadn’t been able to get over to Barnes & Noble, yet, I figured I might find something in the used book store.

Used book stores are great ideas, but I just prefer new books. I don’t mind paying cover price for a good book, but that’s the drawback: you never know what’s going to be a good book.

I looked for a Jack Vance novel but couldn’t find any. Failing twice to find his books, in two different places, made me wonder if I was misremembering his name. Surely I wasn’t. Jack Vance, The Dying Earth. I decided to double check it on the Internet when I got home. [My Web search shows Jack Vance, The Dying Earth is correct.]

But I did find a few other classic books that I’ve not read. The prices for these used books are enticing. It’s hard to pass on grabbing classic paperbacks for two and three dollars each. I ended up buying four books for ten bucks, total:

Three Hearts and Three Lions, by Poul Anderson
Redwall, by Brian Jacques
The First Book of Swords, by Fred Saberhagen
Robot City, by Isaac Asimov

All of these are books I’ve heard of through the years, but never read. I know some science fiction and fantasy fans reading this are saying I’m terribly inexperienced to have not already read these. In my defense, I have to say that I’ve probably read a lot more history and non-fiction books than many sci-fi/fantasy fans have. At least I’m trying to improve my classic book knowledge.

When I got the books home and started examining them closer, I discovered a trick. The Robot City book is not actually written by Isaac Asimov. I found the book with all the other Isaac Asimov novels (many of which I have already read), and the spine says, “Isaac Asimov’s Robot City Book 6 Perihelion.” But at the bottom of the front cover, in a font half the size of Asimov’s name at the top, are the words, “by William F. Wu.”

I’ve never heard of William F. Wu. I bought the book to read Isaac Asimov’s words, because I’ve read some of his other books and found them fascinating. William F. Wu? Bait and switch? Yeah, sure, technically, his name is on the front cover, but so is “($4.50 Canada) – $3.50 U.S.”

Meh. I’ll toss the book on my book shelf and maybe some day I’ll read it. Maybe Wu’s work is good on its own, without riding Asimov’s coattails. I just don’t like being baited and switched.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I put the fitted sheet on the bed and made sure the sides were tucked in neat. Then I grabbed the straight sheet and opened it up. To spread it across the bed, I gave it a big whip. The end went higher than I meant, and it bumped the light fixture over the bed. One of the light bulbs fell out, landing in the center of the bed.

The light bulb actually fell out of its own screw-threaded socket piece. The metal part of the bulb that screws into the socket was still in the socket—just the glass bulb lay on the bed. “Well,” I thought, “at least it landed softly on the bed.” Had it fell on the hardwood floor, it would have shattered, and clean up would have been troublesome.

I let go of the sheet and reached over to pick up the bulb. It was hot for having been on for a couple hours, and I reflexively let go and shouted in pain. The bulb smashed into the footboard of the bed and shattered into a million pieces. Oh, crap!

Little pieces of glass were scattered all over the bed and the floor, and lord knows how far the smash threw them. Oh, double crap. My hand stung from the burn, but I was more stunned by how my stupidity just made the situation oh so much worse. The bulb had landed softly on the bed; it was safe and in one piece. Then I had to pick it up and smash it all over the bedroom.

My wife kept the children out of the bedroom while I tried to clean up all the tiny, glinting, glass shards. There was glass all over the floor, on our sheets, on our comforter, and probably in places I didn’t think of checking. I vacuumed the floor and heard the clickety of the pieces being sucked up. I tried to vacuum the sheets and comforter, but when the hose sucked up the cloth, pieces of glass jumped up all over the place.

There was no way I was going to get all the glass out of the sheets—at least not sure enough that I’d ever be comfortable lying in them. I could just imagine getting cuts and lacerations all over sensitive areas of my body while turning over in the bed. I explained the situation to my wife, and she agreed to let me just throw away the sheets. A shame, that; they were nice, comfortable, and relatively new sheets. The comforter, though, I took outside and shook vigorously. Then I shook it again. Then I laid it across the patio chairs and beat it. Then I gathered it up and shook it again. God, I hope I got all the glass shards out of it. At least, though, it doesn’t lie right on top of our skin in bed. I ran the vacuum hose over it just to be sure. Then I vacuumed the floor again.

When we woke up this morning, we had no scratches or cuts, so I guess I got all the glass out of the bed. I need to get it out of my mind; thinking about there being a stray shard of glass in my bed just makes me shiver.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was in my old hometown again, yesterday, helping my mom move some furniture and boxes around between her home and her business. Out behind the business building, there’s a very old house that’s now used as a storage barn. I and my uncle moved some stuff into and out of the house, and we all took the opportunity to look around in the old place.

The house is somewhere between near 100 years old. It sits about two feet off the ground, on concrete block pillars, and has old style concrete steps leading up to the front porch. It’s in a very delapidated condition—it’s not a show model by any means. The front door lock takes an old skeleton key (which my mom has), but the only functional lock currently on it is a padlock on a new latch.

It’s small: a small front room, a small middle room, a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and a very small closet. The ceiling is maybe six and a half feet from the floor. Another room, notably bigger than the others, looks to have been added on after the house was built. Its ceiling is even lower, and what was a window on the side of the house was made into an embedded shelf in the now interior wall.

All the white paint, inside and outside, is flaked and peeled like bad dry skin. The walls and floors are just one board thick, and there are a few holes showing the ground beneath the house. There’s electricity run to the house for a couple of bare light bulbs with pull chains, but it’s obvious the line and sockets were added some time later in the house’s life.

The place is packed full of junk thrown in by various people: old tools and machines, old lawmowers, old furniture, old. . . junk that I couldn’t identify, etc. (“Old” in this paragraph means “2-10 years.”) My step-dad originally used the house to store things for the business, like extra tables and boxes of supplies, but over the years, some workers and some family tossed more stuff in. I don’t know why most of the old junk in the house now wasn’t taken to the dump instead of thrown in the house—it’s not a good place to store anything you’d ever want back in your living house. There’s a bed mattress in there—upon seeing it, my mom commented that she wouldn’t store a bed mattress in that old house overnight, much less for a year or more. It’s more of a junk yard than a storage house, now.

There’s also about a dozen wasp nests. My mom had exterminators come out a week or so back to kill all the wasps, so there’s bug corpses all over the place. And there were a couple wasps still moving, so we had to keep an eye out for them as we explored around.

There was one closed door in the house that made me curious to look in. I commented that behind the door was probably the old skeletons. While we had some stuff moved away from the door, I went to open it. My mom suggested I stand behind the door to open it, in case anything came out. My uncle made a spooky suggestion, and I’ll admit that my imagination started worrying me. What would be behind that door? Even if there wasn’t anything really spooky or scary in there, there might be an animal or some wasps.

I turned the old knob and pulled the door. It was a bit stuck, so it required a little tug to open. It was just the bathroom. An old sink, tub, some junk, but no toilet. But there was a really old washing machine—something from the 40s or 50s maybe. That was a neat little find; not that we did anything with it but look at it.

The house is an interesting thing to examine, especially when you realize that people actually lived in little homes like that, through hot summers and cold winters. You don’t often see this kind of historical living space. Most historical homes are the larger mansions of their day, not the more common small shacks of the average poor family. The big, old mansions get preserved and shown as examples of historical homes, but the small, old places wear down or get torn down and forgotten. It’s cool to see one of the last such old homes before it inevitably falls apart and is lost.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com