Burning

Monday March 10, 2025

The house almost caught on fire Wednesday night.

It feels appropriate timing since I’ve reached the limit of twice/week newsletters. Unfortunately, this will be the last Monday for a while. It’s just too much work, and even now, I’m distracted thinking about freelance work I should be getting through while I have a little time this Sunday morning. So, we’re burning down the Monday newsletter.

But yeah, so the house almost burnt down on Wednesday night. We have an outdoor outlet that started clicking in a rainstorm a few months ago. I’m no electrician, but I know that’s a sign something’s wrong. We unplugged the backyard lights from the outlet to be on the safe side, but after the rain, the outlet stopped clicking for a long time. It became one of those “we’ll do it eventually” things.

It rained pretty hard on Wednesday night, and around midnight, Goose got out of bed for some water. I got up with him to fill his bowl and heard the outlet clicking again. I thought, “Those things are built to not catch on fire. It will be okay.”

The next morning, Lindsay woke me up saying something was wrong. A breaker had tripped, and overhead lights in the spare room, kitchen, and bathroom weren’t working. Everything else seemed to be fine, but unable to reset the breaker, I called an electrician, figuring we’d address this and the outside outlet.

When he got here, he was perplexed, too, especially when the breaker suddenly reset with a simple switch. My little male ego damaged, I figured he could still fix the outlet, so I took him outside.

I could see from 15 feet away something was wrong. The transparent casing around the outlet was pitch black. The vinyl on either side of the outlet was scorched. When I popped open the casing, an acrid smell poured out and inside, the outlet itself had started disintegrating into black, tarry nastiness.

“That caught on fire last night, didn’t it?” I asked, more or less rhetorically.

“Mmhmm,” The electrician casually assented, tapping the outlet with an electrometer before wrenching it out with pliers. “Never get used to that smell.”

Disco inferno.

The flippers who owned the house before us — these absolute motherfuckers who continue to be the bane of our existence years later — had improperly sealed the casing, so water was able to pour into the outlet, causing it to short-circuit. In this storm, it had become completely flooded, to the point that we had water soaking through the drywall in the basement beneath where the outlet connects to the circuit board. Fortunately, while rain doesn’t play nice with electricity, it also doesn’t play nice with fire. Just as soon as it caused the outlet to catch fire, the rain put it out before it could ignite the house. The hot wire of the outlet burned off from the outlet, which led to the breaker tripping. How fortunate for us to not be burned alive in our sleep.

Anyway, the electrician replaced the outlet and did some work on the panel (I’m beginning to wonder if there’s no standard for electrical work and electricians just all hate each other because this is the third time a guy has looked at our panel, and basically said “The last guy you had really sucked, huh?”) $600 and a Cranney Home Services subscription later, hopefully, our house isn’t at electrical fire risk anymore. Whoopee.

Anyway, life can be taken from you at any point by incompetent developers. Can’t be wasting Sundays. Thanks for reading to those who do. See you Friday.