I've now been living in Charlotte, North Carolina for ten years.

Labels: Charlotte, home

Last Sunday just after midnight we had a brush fire in the field behind our house which has been labeled as arson.

On Thursday at 2:00 am we were awaken to the sounds of returning fire engines. The field was burning again. This time the firefighters already knew how to get to the field so they immediately knocked down the same fence again (which hadn't been permanently fixed yet) and drove on up through my and my neighbor's yards. The fire began just 100 yards away from the first one, right in the tree line that was causing firefighters' access problems on Sunday morning, and burned another acre of land. They had this fire extinguished within a half, which was labeled as arson too. Unlike the first fire, several news crews arrived on scene. Here's video from my sister-station, WSOC-TV, showing one of the trucks driving across my front lawn.

Then today (Friday) around 5pm another brush fire broke out in a different subdivision less than a mile away. This fire got way out of hand, destroying 9 acres of land, damaging several houses and cars. It's too early to say whether that fire is related to the two in the field behind my house, but that's now three brush fires in the same vicinity in less than a week. Here's a story on today's fire, and here's video.

A Side Story:

On my way to work Thursday morning after the 2nd brush fire I was listening to News/Talk WBT-AM as I do every morning, and Al Gardner reported on the fire. However I was shocked to learn that WBT blatantly stole their story from WSOC-TV, and from me in particular. I emailed the photo I had taken of the 1st fire to the newsroom at my sister-station, WSOC-TV, along with specific details and verbiage that was unavailable anywhere else. Details I provided in my email was used in the on-air report and on the website. These same exact same details and unique verbiage not even known to fire investigators yet were then used verbatim in WBT-AM's news report. Sorry but stealing my personal accounts that I gave to only one station shows a complete lack of integrity by WBT-AM.

Labels: home

It's 1:50 a.m. and the last fire engine just left.

Behind my house is open farm land. Here's a photo I took of my back yard five years ago when we had so much rain that it was flooding. But we 're currently in an extensive drought, without any significant rainfall in months. So in contrast to this photo, this field is completely dry and brown, as well as tall and unmowed. It's a tinder box.

Around midnight a fire engine pulled up in front of my house. I noticed that somebody was pointing towards my house so I went outside to ask what was going on. The man pointed again and said "the field's on fire." I looked towards my own back yard and that's exactly what I saw.

Within minutes, more and more fire engines arrived. The fire department was trying to figure out how to get to the fire, because as it turns out, the entire field is surrounded by tree lines on all sides, except the north side which is bounded by a row of houses, each of which has a wooden fence - except for my neighbor, which is why they were at my house. The firefighters cut down the barbed-wire fence at the back of the yard next to mine and were able to drive their 4-wheel-drive trucks across my front lawn and in to my neighbor's back yard, then up the hill to get to the fire. By this time the fire was getting bigger and was less than 200 hundred feet from my property. There were now six fire engines, a dozen heavy-duty trucks, and a helicopter with a search light was circling my house.


I tried to take several photos but not much comes out when you're trying to shoot an empty field at night without a flash. The shot above is the best I could get. Notice the silhouette of a fire fighter on the right side.

I hadn't woken Maegan up yet but it was time to get her dressed in case we needed to leave quickly. But thankfully we never had to leave. Once they got a truck with a water tank up to the fire, they had the whole brush fire put out in less than 15 minutes.

I spoke with a chief afterwards who gave me the phone number for the fire investigator. They obviously haven't positively determined anything yet but he told me that it appeared to be intentionally set.

Labels: home

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately. Here's what's been going on over the past week that wasn't really worthy of dedicated posts.

• I didn't play disc golf for a full month because of the incredible heat we've had in Charlotte all of August. On Thursday I played in my first tournament in 6 weeks, and I took 4th place, my highest finish yet. I won't bore you every time I win plastic (the prizes are new discs), but I will post if I ever come in first.
• Last week we finally got part of our house repairs taken care of. The first floor ceiling was finally patched and I'm not satisfied with the popcorn finishing they did. We're still trying to get the master bathroom floor fixed but nobody is willing to take the job because the "first response" people who came in to dry everything up did more damage to the sub floor than necessary. It's all a freakin' mess that I wish would just go away already.
• I'm now back to working 6 1/2 days per week until December. Joy. Even better is the fact that my non-NFL job (which I don't identify) stopped paying overtime, which really sucks after working what sometimes ends up being a 14 hour shift.
• Ending on a positive note, I am the guru of fantasy sports. I am in the championships in both of my fantasy baseball leagues, which is a huge achievement in one league since I started without a winning week for the first 5 weeks of the season but came back to end up with the 2nd best regular season record. And now it's football season too. In the three leagues I'm in, I'm a combined 6 wins and zero losses (2-0 in each league) and I'm in first place in 2 of my leagues. Booya!
  

Labels: disc_golf, fantasy_baseball, fantasy_football, home, work

Have you seen the episode of The Simpsons episode with Simon Cowell? It starts off with Homer and Bart leaving the water running in the upstairs shower only to later have the entire tub crash down through the living room ceiling? Well that's close to what happened late Friday night / early Saturday morning.

Late Friday night the sink in the master bedroom's bathroom upstairs overflowed, spilling on to the floor. This continue unnoticed for nearly an hour until we eventually heard the unusual sound of rain in the downstairs living room. Oh crap! The upstairs bathroom was so flooded that it had gone through the floor and was pouring out the air conditioning vent. Now after midnight, Patty was quickly throwing towels on the bathroom floor to soak up all the water but the damage was already done. Meanwhile I was downstairs getting a bucket under the vent, but since so much water had already seeped through the floor upstairs, the ceiling downstairs was starting to bow and drip. I quickly drilled several small holes in the ceiling and the water came pouring down and I needed more buckets.

You can see in the photo above that our bathroom floor had to be torn up entirely, as did some of the carpeting in the closet. My insurance company brought in an industrial dehumidifier and several heavy duty fans to help dry out they house. In the second photo you can see where the water was seeping through the ceiling and where we have a couple of new holes.

Labels: home

So Patty and I move into our new home and the first full day, this is what happens...

I'm unpacking the car and see a huge swarm of bees moving down the street. I've never seen anything like it before in my life but I calmly walk inside, close the door, and call Patty over to check it out before it passed by. It didn't pass by. At random, the bees decided my home was a good place to rest and start building it's new nest! Tens of thousands of bees blocked out the sky, trapping Patty and I inside. After about 20 minutes the swarm began condensing in a bush on our front lawn. Within another 20 minutes most the swarm had formed a basketball-size mass-of-bees. No hive, just a solid ball of bees. With that many bees, we had no choice but to hire a professional Bee Keeper. He came over with his bee suit and took care of the problem. Our new neighbors whom we don't even know yet were sitting on their front porches watching this bizarre spectacle. When a professional Bee Keeper tells you that it's one of the biggest swarms he's ever seen in his life, you know that's a lot of bees!

Labels: home

PATTY AND I ARE HOMEOWNERS! Before we were just under contract, but now we've actually signed the documents to make it official.

Labels: home

Our offer was accepted! Patty and I bought our first house!

Labels: home

Patty and I just put a bid in on a new house. WOW! It's a nice 2 story, 3 bedroom home in a good neighborhood near Carowinds in South Charlotte.

Labels: home