Month: June 2016

The most surprising thing about this whole experience for us has been the generosity of our community. Our family, friends, schools, sports teams, community and even people we don’t know have been so generous with their time, things and money. The support has been humbling and we are trying to figure out a way to thank everyone, so stay tuned on that.

I plan to share a few specific stories from this support here, and will do my best to recognize everyone who has supported us.

The first story I want to share was from the day after the fire. For some reason, I thought I personally needed to go to Target and pick up some basic necessities for the family — toothbrushes, deodorant, etc. At some point during the day, someone had given me some cash, so with my cash in hand (literally –  I had no purse),  and in a borrowed car, I went to Target.

Running on no sleep and a lot of adrenaline, I navigated the store for the things we needed. I was definitely in a fog, but also liked the feeling of normal routine it brought me.

I got to the checkout and was watching the total bill for my purchases grow and grow. The final total was more than $40 higher than I could afford. I had dropped my crumpled up wad of cash on the counter to count and asked the cashier to start taking things out of the bag for me.

Just then, a woman gets into line behind me. It was my dear friend, Karin Gaertner, who was in Target picking up a few things on this Memorial Day afternoon. She gives me a big “Hey Dory!!! How’s it going?” I looked at her and completely lost it.

I proceed to have a complete melt down in the line at Target while I tell Karin the story. She’s hugging me. I’m crying. The cashier is confused, but also joins us for a hug.

Karin shoves the crumpled cash back into my hands and pays for my things. I am relieved. We say goodbye and I walk to the parking lot and suddenly stopped, and stood there hopelessly. I had absolutely no recollection of what car I was driving. I knew it was a light colored sedan, but other than that, I couldn’t remember anything about what it looked like and where I parked it.

That was the first time of many I would lose a borrowed car. I learned to use the alarm button on the fob to find my cars over the course of the next few weeks.

There was a reason Karin was there at Target that afternoon. And, it doesn’t matter which higher power I believe in — something or someone aligned the stars for me that afternoon,  I’m glad Karin was there.

As much as our lives are finding some routine and some normalcy, there are many things that may never be the same for us. Because the cause of our house fire has been reported as “undetermined”, it’s hard for us to not speculate on the dozens of different scenarios that could have started the fire. I’m hopeful that with some time, we’ll react better in certain situations, but for now, we find that seemingly normal, everyday things are affected by our house-fire experience. For example:

• Fire cliches. Listen closely to day-to-day conversations. We “burn” and “fire” a lot in our daily speech. I recently had a client cut short a meeting because he had to go “put out some fires.” Someone told Annika she could “burn all her Badger t-shirts now that she’s a Gopher.” I feel the pit in my stomach grow when I hear these fire references. 
• Power outage. Last weekend, a band of strong thunderstorms rolled through Stillwater. After the storm went through, we all headed to bed about 10 p.m. As we were settling in, the electricity in the house flickered on and off a few times. It finally went off. Then back on. Then off again. It stayed off at this time. Because there was no active storm in the area, we immediately thought there was an electrical problem in the house. Which means, we were all nervous there could be a fire. It turned out to be a widespread, storm-related outage.
• Mowing the lawn. I recently spent a few hours mowing our lawn at the burnt house.  Outside of the fact that it smells and looks horrible there, it was still nice to be out on our land. When I was finished, I left the tractor outside because I was nervous to put it in the barn, afraid the hot engine could ignite something.
• Gas fireplace. You would have thought that because our rental house has a gas, not wood, fireplace we’d feel safe. On the contrary, the eternal flame of the pilot light is actually quite disconcerting to all of us.
  

  Flameless candles hold so much more appeal for me now than they did just one month ago. At this point in our life, any flame is a bad flame.

• Fire pits. Hanna was out to eat at a restaurant recently and a little girl went running through the restaurant yelling “fire! fire!” Hanna got really nervous but quickly realized the girl was running to sit by the outside fireplace.

So if you’re ever with any of us, please be patient with any obsessive-compulsive behavior that might be tied to pyrophobia. We’re working through it, but we’ve had our fill of fire for a while.

You can see Kirk’s black Suburban sitting next to the house as the garage fire raged. This photo was taken just 20 minutes after we left the house.

Although The Struggle Is Real video is really funny –  and I’ve been known to quote it occasionally – for us, there is no irony in the saying these days.  I’m not one to complain, but even the seemingly simple tasks have been downright arduous. When we say we lost everything, we mean it. We ran out of the house in our pajamas and had nothing but the clothes on our backs. We have to replace just about all material things in our lives.

There’s one story in particular that epitomizes how tough things have been. A few days after the fire,  I stopped to get Jimmy John’s sandwiches for lunch. The boy behind the counter told me they were out of bread. Really? The sandwich shop didn’t have bread? Something as simple as picking up lunch couldn’t go my way.

But here’s a story more relevant to our rebuilding: Replacing the car keys for Kirk’s truck has taken almost a week and 5-6 hours of dedicated time. For whatever reason, Kirk parked his truck outside the night of the fire. Surprisingly, even though the truck sat very close to the house, it is in fine shape. But, the keys were in the house, so we needed to replace them.

In order to get new keys, it went like this:

• I called the car dealer, and am told I need to show proof of ownership of the car – specifically, I need the title.
• Luckily, the title was in the safe deposit box at the bank; I needed my photo ID to get in there.
• So I go to the  DMV to get my drivers license replaced. Something goes my way — I just need my social security number and $15  to replace that.
• With my drivers license in hand, I head to bank and find they don’t have a master key to the safe deposit boxes. (ours was in the house.) I have to make an appointment to have it rekeyed; the locksmith can’t come out for two days.
• Two days later, I get the car title out of the safe deposit box.
• I head to the car dealer and get new keys made.
• Turns out I have to bring car to dealer to get the fob programmed.
• From there, I need to find a ride out to the house so I can get Kirk’s car and bring it to the dealer for fob programming.
• One week later, we finally have a key for the car.

I don’t share this story to complain, but to point out that rebuilding takes patience, flexibility and hard work. The entire family is committed and all of them have embraced these three traits – I’m so proud of all of them.

 
Es gibt auch elektromagnetische wellen, die durch die obige definition ebenfalls mit ghostwriter österreich kosten erfasst werden.

It’s been exactly two weeks, and I’m finally finding the time to sit down and tell the beginning of this story. As a family, we’ve decided that sharing our story will serve a few different purposes: it’s an easy way for us to share our journey in rebuilding our home, but it’s also a way for us to show our gratitude to those who have helped us along the way. We hope we can help others too by offering tips and advice about things we’re learning from the fire to the new construction.

So, follow us home again to Silver Creek. We hope we all grow, laugh and learn along the way.

SO … here’s the long story short. It started as a typical Memorial Day weekend. Kirk, Hanna, Kirsten, Tomas and I were all home — Annika was at a friend’s cabin. Hanna’s birthday often falls on the holiday weekend  – and it did this year – so we spent the day celebrating with her, including taking her out for birthday dinner in Minneapolis. We came home from dinner around 7:30 p.m.

Kirsten had gone to bed after a marathon viewing of American Ninja Warrior. Kirk, Hanna and Tomas were watching a movie in the master bedroom, and I had retreated to Tomas’ bed for some sleep.

Chloe and Boomer started frantically barking just after 11 p.m.; it was the same time that Kirsten saw the fire out her window.

Just after 11 p.m., two things happened simultaneously: the dogs started wildly barking and I jumped out of bed, suspecting a prowler. Kirsten came running out of her room at the same moment with a look of terror I’d never seen before. She screamed that she could see flames out her window, coming out of the garage service door.

We yelled for everyone to get out and we all quickly ran out of the house into the backyard;  the two dogs ran with us.  We were so panicked, we didn’t even grab our phones.

We made it the 50 yards from the house to the barn and we turned around and looked. The garage was engulfed in flames and all sorts of popping, cracking and other eerie sounds were coming out of the garage. We  just stood there for what seemed like an eternity,  not knowing what to do.  We started yelling, hoping a neighbor could hear us, but we got no response. Kirk and Hanna decided to run to the road to see if they could flag down a car. I sat with the other kids and the dogs, trying to keep them all calm.

Standing in the road in his dark grey, Exofficio “Give and Go” boxer briefs, Kirk wasn’t really doing us any favors. Car after car sped by Kirk as he tried to get people to stop.  Frustrated, Hanna did a  400 yard dash up the neighbor’s driveway. Once she got to their house, she discovered they weren’t home. She grabbed the front door handle and realized it wasn’t locked so she ran in and called 911.

About two hours after we discovered the fire, the home was beginning to collapse.

According to the fire department’s report, this call was made at 11:14 p.m.  (For the record, a second call came in at the same time as a welfare check for a half-naked man in the middle of Norell Avenue.) By 11:20 the first fire truck and the sheriff were on the scene. The fire captain did a quick assessment and found the garage engulfed in flames and quickly spreading.

For 10 minutes, we watched helplessly, while the fire in our home grew exponentially with every gasp of oxygen it took. The flames quickly grew  higher and higher, and moved farther and farther through the house while we waited for more help to arrive.

By 11:30, the first tanker trucks arrived and grew to include 14 tanker trucks from 10 different fire departments. At any one time, there were 20 firefighters working the fire. By dawn, they will have used more than 110,000 gallons of water to fight the fire.

My brother and my parents arrived and we huddled together, watching what turned out to be the Memorial Day bonfire of our nightmares. We found lawn chairs in the barn and set up camp in the front yard until dawn.

The nightmare continued, when at about 3 a.m., they called in a large excavator to help control the blaze. For those of you who have seen our house, you know it has a non-traditional layout. Alright, it was down-right crazy, with all the different levels, and nooks and crannies, which made the perfect house for hide-and-seek, but not for firefighters trying to find a way to stop this fire.

The excavator tearing down the house to help control the fire.

Because there were 14 tanker trucks blocking our driveway, the excavator driver had to get creative. Right out of a horror movie, the machine came marching through the woods, picking up trees and tossing them aside to make his path.

Backlit by the many firetrucks, this giant shadow of a machine heaved its way into the smoke cloud that had settled into the yard. It began attacking the house with an army of firefighters supporting it. Our home was torn down, section by section, piece by piece.

What was left of the garage the next morning.

By 5 a.m., it was over. As quickly as the sun rose, the 20+ emergency vehicles disappeared. We were left alone with the smoldering remains of our home.

With nothing but some borrowed clothes on our backs, we walked away from our home. We went to reflect, refresh and refuel at my brother’s home.  The story picks up again a few hours later as we begin the search for our two cats, Bandit and Elliot.

 
The idea behind this was probably that the porch was at the end of the church furthest away from can you help me with my homework the altar, just as galilee, an outlying portion of the holy land, was far from jerusalem.