The Car! The Knee! The Fire!

So it's been quite a week around here.

The same day that I blew out the back window of our car, Dan played in a church softball game and injured his knee. He went to his primary MD and then to an orthopedist, hobbling all the way, and has been diagnosed with an ACL tear. He is really uncomfortable and trying to get the swelling down and has to decide if he's going to have the surgery to repair it. We have a follow up appointment in three weeks with the orthopedist to get more info on the surgery, recovery time, etc and then will make our decision from there. Dan's certainly no professional athlete, but he loves playing softball every summer and he does have three kids that he wants to be able to play with for the next 15 years without worrying about his knee giving out.

The car has been fixed: new back window, new bumper, and some bumps and scratches on the back all buffed out. I drove it home from the repair shop yesterday and when Dan asked me how it felt, I told him she's riding like a woman in a new pair of jeans that makes her butt look small. The car is rockin'. She was a bit jealous, however, of how much we liked the rental car- a loaded Buick Enclave- so we tried to downplay all that. But seriously- the Enclave was gorgeous. And it had a backup rear video camera that popped up in the rearview mirror everytime you went into reverse, which was helpful so I didn't backup again into a non-moving object. I told Dan that this would be a possibility for us to buy after the Pilot was done, and then he told me that they are about $40K and then I told him a minivan would probably work out just as well.

On the same day that all this nonsense with the window and the knee happened, we also found out that a house in our newly-moved-into-development had been burned down by an arsonist. Lovely.

The day before, on Wednesday, I and my brother and his wife, who were in town this past week (more about that in a later, happier post), and some of our gaggle of children went for a walk from my parents' house to our house. On the way back, we thought we saw smoke rising over some trees. Then it became black smoke, smoke that we could smell, and my brother called the police about it. As he was hanging up, the sirens started screaming in the distance, and before long we watched as police cars and fire chief and fire trucks and more police went tearing down the street. When we got back to my parents' house a few minutes later, we dropped off the kids and Brian and I hopped into my dad's van and went down the street. After a few hundred feet, we could see the house on fire: red and orange angry flames ravaging the house, coming out of the roof, sloughing off the melting vinyl siding on the sides.

I had never seen anything like it in my life.
It was horrifying and destructive and violent.

Brian had the good sense to ask the police officer who was diverting traffic if anyone was in the house and thankfully he answered no. We found out later that the family- parents and three kids- were on a 2 week vacation when this happened. Brian and I watched as the water started putting out the flames and very quickly the majority of the fire was subdued.
Dan later was walking from our house to my parents' house and talked to another fire official who was diverting traffic. He told Dan it seemed like an electrical fire, which freaked us out a bit since the house we just bought and the house that burned are the same age and built by the same people. And my dad just kept saying how unusual it would be for a house of that age to have an electrical fire.
So about ten minutes after I backed out into the pickup truck on Thursday- did I mention that I saw it? And it was NOT MOVING? - a friend of mine pulls up in her car and tells me that she knows the family whose house burned down and that it was arson.
Someone broke into the house, sprayed gasoline in every room and set every room on fire. The house is a total loss.
The idea that someone could do that to another human being and their family is unfathomable to me.
They arrested the person who they think did it yesterday, and it's a 17 year old boy who lives in a nearby neighborhood.
I cannot even imagine the heartache that his family is feeling as well.

Sometimes the world doesn't make a whole lotta sense, and the only thing you can do is pray.
Pray hard.