FIRE

Friday night I saw the Toy Story double feature in 3D! I definitely loved those movies as a child and watched the first one at least 50 times (because it was my little brother's favorite movie), but I probably haven't seen either one in 7-8 years so it was almost like watching them again for the first time. I was really surprised how good they were still this time around as an adult. There were a lot of jokes that went completely over my head when I was little.

I went with Eia and Justin and Kayley and Denis and a few of Kayley's other friends, and it was $14 well spent.

Friday night we were supposed to play Mario Party with our housemates, but instead, Eia and I stayed up until about 3 in the morning (I have no idea how this happened) looking online for various pieces of our Halloween costumes. I now have everything I need to be Angelica Pickles aside from some orange socks, purple shoes, and a doll that looks like Cynthia. Basically I just need to track down a blonde Barbie doll, of which I don't have.

Saturday morning, about 4 hours later, I woke up (hating my alarm clock) to drive into Issaquah to see my brother march in the Salmon Days parade. He plays trumpet in the band. I also just get kind of warm and fuzzy watching the parade each year because I marched in it every year from 7th grade up to my senior year of high school. When my brother went by in his (dorky/awesome) band uniform, I did the standard "Wooooo Nick Horner!!!" older sister embarrassing thing that's expected of me, and luckily my brother is a good sport and just laughed behind his trumpet and kept walking.

Then their band director saw me and his eyes widened and, while still marching, said to me, "I still owe you like a THOUSAND dollars or something!" before continuing on down the street. To explain, awhile ago they entered this competition by submitting a video set to a song they played, for this local radio station thing. The first prize was $10,000 for their band program. I may or may not have mentioned the video on fiveawesomegirls and got a lot of my subscribers to vote for them. I am obviously not claiming that I alone got them to win, but I definitely sent a lot of people in their direction and at the end of the competition, my old high school was handed a check for $10,000.
It was very exciting. And it was nice to see him and be acknowledged, because I had honestly kind of forgotten about it, and this is a HUGE DEAL to them because our high school never had thaaaat much money for the arts.

Anyway, I felt even more warm and fuzzy after that exchange. Sometimes YouTube makes me feel like a superhero, and I'm glad I can use my powers for good. xD Oh I'm a loser.

That afternoon I ducked into my work, because the theatre that employs me is right there on the parade route. My coworkers were really happy to see me, especially my manager Coral who I would consider to be one of my best friends honestly. Eia was there as well since she teaches dance there, and we hung out in the box office until 2, since we decided to see the new show playing there, "Chasing Nicolette". I missed the opening because I was still in London.

THEN. Last night we were at home, hanging out in the living room with our housemates, complaining that our Saturday night was boring. Eia and I were jealous that half our friends were at a Sci-Fi Con in St. Louis and the other half at the Sidewalk show in New York, when SUDDENLY. Justin was in the kitchen and we heard him shouting, so we ran to see what was going on - out the back window, all we could see was GIANT ORANGE FLAMES.

I have never seen a group of people go so quickly into panic mode.

We ran outside, started grabbing buckets, filling them with water - the apartment building across from us in the back alley was ON FIRE. There was an old couch that someone had left by the back door and it was completely engulfed in flames, and it was spreading really quickly up the wall of the entire complex. A girl ran over from another house with a fire extinguisher, and when it ran out, got completely hysterical. Justin was still running back and forth with buckets of water. Finally he took our recycle bin, just dumped the contents on the floor of our kitchen, and handed it to Eia and Tyler's cousin who ran upstairs to fill it in the bathtub. All this time he was on the phone with 911.

People were spilling out of their houses at this point, and I realized no one from the actual apartment that was on FIRE was outside. Myself and a few other peoplee started shouting "Hello? Who lives in this apartment? You need to come out right now!" There were no fire alarms. Why were there no fire alarms?

Finally, finally people started coming outside, completely bewildered. I met a lot of my neighbors that I had never seen before, all standing huddled and confused, clutching their laptops.

The fire was almost subdued at this point. The flames were down but it was smoking and smoldering and everyone was really scared.

Then the firemen showed up and took over.

Everything is okay, but the wall is blackened, the couch is nonexistent, and at one point during the night a bunch of us just got completely blasted with a fire hose because we happened to be standing in the wrong spot.

Needless to say, Justin went out that night and bought new batteries for our smoke alarms, because we realized in the midst of everything that NONE of our smoke alarms are even on right now because they were all beeping annoyingly due to low batteries. So that's fixed.

Anyway. Later on, we laughed about how earlier, we'd wished for a more exciting Saturday night. Be careful what you wish for, man.