 Good morning beautiful friends and welcome to the first Saturday story time here on my channel now before we dive into the meat of the story, I figured I should probably answer the question that's on everyone's mind. No one's house burns down twice. Is Joe an arsonist? Valid question. No, absolutely not. I was not on the premises either time or anywhere near it, but it is bizarre to have your house burn down once, let alone twice. So allow me to tell you the story today of how that happened and what it was like. Let's set the stage for fire number one. The year was, I was 16, so 2007? Meth. And my older brother Sam had just put a sick stereo system into his Mazda RX-7. He was working on that car all summer long and had just changed the gas filter. Now, when he did that, all the gas from his car spilled out on the floor of our garage, which shouldn't be a huge issue as long as you clean it up properly and he and my dad did that. The issue was that the next day the freezer sparked. My brother and I had driven to go see the movie 300. You remember 300? Gerald Butler, all the shirtless men. Well, while I watched 300 men take back the world, my world fell apart a little bit. When we got out of that movie, my dad was actually waiting for us, which was weird. We were heading home anyway, so why was my dad waiting for us in the parking lot? He told us that everyone was safe, everyone was fine, and that's a really good way to panic someone starting out by being like, it's gonna be okay. Like, who died, dad? And told us that there had been a major house fire that my mom got out, that the firefighters got our pets out, which was my biggest concern and he didn't want us driving home alone knowing that information. We learned eventually what had actually caused the fire, that the freezer had sparked, hit the gas fumes, house went up, and our house wasn't a total loss that time, so it wasn't like the fire leveled it. It was still standing, kind of. There was just so much smoke damage and so much structural damage that we were not allowed back in for many, many, many months as they rebuilt it, as they cleaned everything. A lot of our possessions, we were able to get back like a lot of our clothes, they deep cleaned whatever you do to get the permeating scent of smoke out of things they did. I'm going to pause real quick and say one thing. I was dealing with lots of teenager stuff and this was just like one more thing on a pile of teenager crap. My family was going through all kinds of stuff, my brother graduated high school, while we were living in a rental house as our house was being rebuilt. It was a super tumultuous time and the specific details of how the house fire affected my life are often lost to me that time, which is why house fire 2 is what I have the most to say about because that I remember in vivid detail. That one so deeply affected me for reasons which you are about to understand and I'm sure probably to some extent has lasting implications on my life. So with that said, let's kind of close the door on fire number one. We were able to move back into our house after about a year and flash forward to June 11th, 2013. I and my family were not the only ones who lost our house in this fire. 509 homes were burnt in this fire. That morning I packed my Sadie Bear into the car and I drove to Starbucks and I sat outside with her. She sat at my feet. I have this picture and I did a little bit of writing before I took her to that appointment. We got out of that appointment and I was actually going to go to another coffee shop, get somewhere work done, soak up some sunshine, sit with my puppy dog, right? And I looked north and I saw what kind of looked like almost like a mushroom cloud. What? I mean, clouds look funny in Colorado. Our weather changes on the daily, but this was kind of coming up from the ground and was dark. So I started calling people and no one was home. I'd moved back in with my parents and we were living in Black Forest, actually in the same house that had burnt down the first time and then rebuilt. I couldn't really tell like where that plume of smoke or cloud or whatever it was was coming from. I can just tell it was like generally in the direction sort of where my house was and as I got closer to the forest and the line of cars that was trying to get back in, I realized that the forest was on fire. So I was one of the last cars that was actually let into the forest. My mom was stopped because she was trying to get home too. My dad was stopped. My dad's a rebel, so let's just say he got in through other means and I floored at home because I actually saw flames. I saw flames at the top of a tree not too terribly far away and it freaked me out and that was really scary but also my other dog was at home. I remember rushing up our driveway, getting out of the car real quick to run in and grab my dog and I wasn't sure what else. I wasn't thinking straight at that point and I will never forget what the air felt like. It was like it was electrified, everything looked orange, it smelled horrible. When I later learned where it started it was really not that far away and I ran in, got my other dog in the car and had like a second to grab a few more things. You're not really thinking straight in those kinds of situations like in either traumatic situations or emergency situations. It's not like you have full capacity of your brain power generally speaking and I definitely didn't. What I was thinking is this is probably no big deal. There's a fire somewhere close by. I'm sure they'll take care of it. I probably should get a toothbrush because maybe we'll stay in a hotel tonight because I know that they're blocking cars. So I literally picked up a toothbrush, no toothpaste or anything else. A toothbrush and then on the off chance that you know something bad did happen I grabbed all my old journals because that was like my history. My mom told me to grab my jewelry box and then I grabbed a laundry basket that had like a couple of clean clothes on it and then mostly dirty clothes and then I gunned it out of there. My family and then Brian who I was dating at the time met up at a Starbucks and basically sat there and watched as the forest burned down as we heard updates from firefighters as our house burnt. It was a black forest fire. It ended up burning almost 15,000 acres and killed two people which is really heartbreaking. And no one knew like for days if their house was burnt or not but we had some like insider information because a friend of ours knew a firefighter and he said there's nothing left on your street. You know what we didn't know for sure until the county officially released this list and if your house isn't read it means total loss like there is nothing, nothing left and ours was a total loss. So they kept people out of that area for a long time understandably but eventually we got to go back in and it was like walking into a scene from like some kind of apocalyptic movie because like my neighborhood this area I'd grown up in forever like where I had so many memories and life was was a war zone and our house there was literally nothing left like the there was the foundation and there was a bunch of ash sunken into that and bits and pieces of things and it was weird and you would find some things that were like still intact like we found a mug that was still perfectly intact and white pewter spoons tell me how a house burns down and falls on itself and then the ashes burn and white pewter spoons somehow make it out alive I don't know and I have these pictures from what I called funeral for a house my parents and I went back out there and at this point my brother was living away at college which is why he's not a part of these pictures and we basically said like bye to the ashes of our house which I think was kind of healing in a weird way the emotional impact of losing a house was severe it varied how each of us responded to it was entirely different how each of us have continued to respond to it was entirely different and I can only speak for myself one of the big reasons I moved in with my parents is because I was not emotionally stable I was I was really messed up I was dealing with PTSD and really really deep dark depression like I just started going on medication for the first time ever because I was just not in a good place and this added on to that made things hard and one of the most difficult things is like the change of routine you don't think routine is really that important or like familiarity like being able to go home is necessarily that important until it is completely ripped away until you cannot have that anymore and a lot of people would be like oh thank god you just lost stuff like it's just stuff but it's not we didn't lose any family members or pets which I can't express enough how grateful I am for but the loss was still significant like we lost 25 years of Christmas ornaments that my brother and I had made as kids and we lost my grandma's jewelry and tea cups which you can never replace and we lost so many memories and that sense of like belonging and home and there's so much people would say like oh you can replace stuff but you can but you can build a new life and I remember very specifically like when I saw our house come up in red on that list that like it was a total loss immediately I got bitter and cynical which I don't love admitting but at that point in my life I had very little hope in humanity and I got mad at people in that moment like people who hadn't even said anything to me yet I got mad at people because I was like they won't understand I was predicting their lack of understanding I was predicting that they wouldn't care about this loss and I have never been so wrong about humanity in my life the fire happened in June and this is like the only part of the story that I ever really get emotional about but it's worth getting emotional about because it's so sweet in November and December kids made us Christmas ornaments because like they knew we wouldn't have any and they were like paper and glue and glitter and string I mean really simple but that one thing the fact that this community remembered six months later that families wouldn't have Christmas ornaments made it really difficult for me to be cynical and bitter at humanity and honestly there were a lot of things like that like people rallied around us to help and by us I mean like everyone who had lost homes obviously I don't speak for everybody but everyone that I knew who lost a house had support had help had people willing to be there we had strangers show up to help us sift through the ashes of our house the loss of our house and the black forest fire was horrible you know it was awful eventually we rebuilt on the same piece of land one of the hardest things about the fire for me is that just like aggravated all of these issues that were already existing like I was like trying to make it through I was trying to like figure out how to keep my head above water already and then like the rug was ripped out from underneath me so for me and this is not true for other people that I know who have gone through this or other people in my family it was like it just exacerbated existing issues and existing problems and made things a lot worse rather than being just its own thing if that makes sense so yeah it was it was really hard and I think just the constant daily stress of having to adjust to everything new I just realized it's pretty similar to like now like trying to adjust to life without a leg it's like everything is new all the time and that constant strain wears on you then you figure out a new normal you you grieve the loss as you build a new life which is what my family and I had to do I really feel for my parents especially because like everything was gone from all of us everything was gone baby pictures that you can't get back were gone but even that we had friends sending us pictures from 20 years ago and when I look back at everything that happened there were a lot of parts that sucked that hurt but speaking for myself it's impossible for me to look at any of those crappy parts without being completely overwhelmed by the kindness it really broke the way that I was trying hard to look at people through these like cynical angry bitter glasses and I try to put those glasses on still sometimes I think we all have reasons not to trust people we all have reasons to like to be bitter and jaded and and I have a grocery list of reasons as well but I look at those moments and in the ashes of my life I got to see the beauty of humanity so now I always joke third time it's not the charm I'm done I'm good I'm like maxed out on house fires we're good to go two was plenty but it was a crazy season to get through and we moved into our rebuilt house a year and a month after took them a little over a year to completely rebuild like an entirely new house on an entirely different part of my parents property and this year will be the six year anniversary of the fire and I mean I think our family's doing great again I can only speak for myself but I know it really deeply impacted all of us in different ways and for me I think I healed from the loss a while ago but I definitely learned a lot through both of those situations specifically the second one and I think the biggest takeaway I had was just that people can actually be really amazing in the midst of grief and loss I lost a lot of the bitterness and cynicality I think that's a word that I was trying to hold on to that is today's story time I would love to hear your thoughts on this and on this like new segment on my channel if you're if you're for it or if it's not your cup of tea I'd love to hear but I really like talking to you guys and telling you stories from my life and I thought this one was kind of a unique and interesting one also ironically as I was getting ready to film this my husband texted me oh I have to clean in it and I was like hey babe don't worry I already got a lot of stuff done and jokingly he said did you burn the house down like is that how I was able to get everything done and I was like oh my god I'm literally setting up for the how I how my house is burned down twice video I thought it was funny he makes jokes about my house burning down all the time he thinks it's hilarious and it kind of is anyways I love you guys I'm thinking about you I will see you next Saturday with another Saturday story time and we will go from there but I'll see you before then with more videos I love you guys I hope you have a beautiful rest of your Saturday and I will talk to you soon bye guys