A different day

You know, a lot of days are just like any other day. Oh, they have minor variations to be sure, but within well-defined parameters. Today is not being one of them.

I went to Curves this morning. It was still a bad idea. I still had to skip about four of the machines, and use two of them one handed, which they're NOT designed for. And YES my elbow is sorer than it was earlier. This is driving me crazy. How can a person injure an elbow and not even know about it? How can an elbow feel this much better and still hurt this much? Like, I feel stupid going to the doctor NOW, but...what's wrong with it? (Throwing hay bales every night after work isn't helping either, guaranteed, but Jim hurt his back on the weekend, so we're gimping it out together.)

Anyway, back to the story. I'm at Curves, sitting on the bench and putting my street shoes back on, and I glance out the window to see the hugest plume of black smoke. Something is quite obviously on fire, and not that far away. Traffic looks normal, though. I glance at the clock and see that I have time to spare to walk *the long way around* to work.

A seniors' 4-storey strata apartment building is on fire, right next to the nursing home. I know two of the people who live in the strata, one of my bosses' mothers-in-law, and a fellow whose flooring we've recently re-done. I know the mom is currently in hospital from a bad fall, which seems suddenly to be a good thing. And the old fellow I know comes across the street looking like he's seen a ghost. His is a ground floor apartment, and he says at the very best the place will be flooded with water damage. That didn't look true for quite awhile, though. Why does it take so very long for the fire department to get hoses going when they're right there already?

After awhile I decided that I really ought to go to work, that eventually somebody might want in the store, so I cut through the alley and...met my bosses. They'd seen the smoke from where they were working across town and thought it looked close to the store, so had come to investigate. So I walked back over to the fire with them while they talked to the people that they knew. Anyway, I got to work kinda late in the end.

So far today I have finished reading Holly's *Vincalis the Agitator*, which makes me want to re-read the Secret Texts trilogy to pick up on the foreshadowing type stuff in it. It's been a couple of years since I read them.

I actually have gotten a start on the pricing guides for the store, but I'm not too big on re-arranging the samples and stuff; my elbow hurts. Soon I'm going to have pain on the right side from favoring the left.

At noon I drove past the strata (or at least close enough to see). The fire is out. The building is still standing, but has no roof and looks plenty warped. Everyone who lived in the building is accounted for. The nursing home was evacuated to the rec center eight or nine blocks away; I imagine they're back home by now, unless there is water damage on the side of the building nearest the strata.