"This had Better be Good"

I'm snuggling down into my nice warm bed Wednesday at about nine-thirty in the a.m. when I hear the doorbell ring.  Damnit, a stranger.  Anyone who's not a stranger to the house always uses the back door instead of the front.  It's just the way we do it here.  And rightly so, as the driveway goes all the way to the back of the house, and it's a closer walk. 

Anyway, so I mutter to myself "This had better be good," and grudgingly get up to answer the door.  At this time the phone starts ringing, and I grumble under my breath, "Damnit!"  So I hurriedly throw on some halfway presentable clothes and race to grab the phone.  Only, when I grab the phone, the damn caller has already hung up. 

Prick.   So I run to answer the door, but when I get there, no one is there.  I open up the door and step out onto the porch, and see a woman getting into a white pickup truck.  I wave her down and ask, "Can I help you?"

She says, "Hey, your YARD is on fire!"

I hesitate just a moment in a state of incomprehension.  My yard?  Fire?  Is this a joke? I'm thinking.  In the space of a breath I analyze the possibilities.  Either my yard really is on fire, or she's using modern slang to tell me she likes my yard.  It's not very likely she rang the bell just to tell me she likes my yard, and she doesn't seem young enough or quite "hip" enough to use modern slang like that.  Suspicion rising, I walk to the end of the porch (front and back span the breadth of the house) and take a look, and sure enough, the YARD IS ON FIRE!  Holy heck!  So I run inside and call 911, since I have no clue what the number for the fire department is, and the nice operator puts me through to the fire department.

After spending about ten minutes on the phone with the woman, answering the same five or six questions over and over again (she just rephrased them, I swear it), I'm told that I have to stay outside to direct the firemen and answer questions.  What, like these FIREMEN, whose profession is to deal with fire, can't locate the damn thing, especially when it's making a nice ten foot radius all the way around the fence?  "Hey, John, is that red and orange glowing, hot thing the fire?  Or is it just some dirt?  It's hard to tell with these yard fires sometimes."

Okay, so I wait outside for about ten minutes, give or take a couple of minutes, and when the firemen get there they get right to work, basically ignoring me.  Which would have been fine, except that I thought I was outside to talk to these guys.  Anyway, I was more concerned that they get the fire put out, which was spreading quickly thanks to a nice quilt of leaves and the fact that Randy's property butts up to a lovely thick forest.

Anyway, they put out the fire and pack up, and just as I start to think that perhaps NO ONE was even going to acknowledge my presence (which would've been fine except that I'd waited outside this whole time because the lady told me to), the only female fire(wo)man FINALLY walks up to me and asks me a bunch of the SAME questions that the one over the phone asked me.

Someone find me some excedrin.

Moral of the story:  never, ever say "This had better be good" when being interrupted, because it might just be a good reason!

(Copied and pasted from an e-mail I wrote to someone else, to save myself the re-telling of the story.)

-Ave