The Design for Life blog posted absolutely brilliant, simple instructions for creating your own yard torches. Say goodbye to all those crappy tikis stuck in the mud. Just be careful you don’t burn your house down…

I’m absolutely going to make a few of these for my lil’ backyard patio. Yay, fun house project!

As some of you know, our awesome kitty Werner passed away earlier this month from a rare kitten disease. It was heartbreaking. We had only had him for about three months, but he was the first addition to our family and he was truly a special cat. Frail and small, but he had a huge heart.

It’s been almost a month since then, and we decided we sure missed a little furball running around our house so we went ahead and adopted another kitten from PAWS. Maysle saw me walking by his cage and immediately reached out to me. I’m pretty sure we were fated to be together. He’s adorable, soft and precocious. And yes, we continue the trend of naming out pets after our favorite filmmakers… we are nerds, after all.

Last night, Audrey were already in bed early. Probably 11pm. Sometime around the witching hour I get woken by loud banging on our door. Still groggy, I crack my eyes open to see our room flooded with flashing red lights.

“Uh oh,” I think. “Something ain’t right.”

Sure enough, I stand at the window in my boxers and see what appears to be our whole house surrounded by fire trucks. Oh boy.

“Audrey, wake up! Get your clothes on!”

I throw on some jeans and a t-shirt and run downstairs. The following thoughts ran through my mind:

1. my wife gets dressed hella slowly, even in an emergency
2. I’m glad they made me buy that home insurance
3. funny, I don’t feel that warm in here
4. wouldn’t it be wild if flames started coming out my closet
5. if our house burns down, we’ll move to India
6. that’s not so bad. could be worse.

So while I’m outside checking out my neighbor’s house on fire and smoking something fierce and the firemen putting it out and the campfire smell when there isn’t a campfire and the cold, damp night, I think, dang we’re lucky it’s been put out.

As one of the firemen are walking past back to his truck I say, “boy it’s great you guys came so quick.”

He laughs knowingly. “Yeah, we’re the ones who will always come. We always come when you call.”

I smiled and almost asked him if he read my blog last week.