Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Is there something wrong with the fact that when the firemen knocked on our door this afternoon and requested that we evacuate the premises due to the intense smoke billowing from the house fire three doors over (a mere 45 feet away in a row house attached to ours), the most pressing worry that came to my mind was "what project should I bring with me?"

In defense of my claim to sanity, though I briefly considered the problem of how to rescue all the yarn in the house, I quickly dismissed that notion as impossible and calmly focussed on getting my husband and myself and the teddy bear (who is something of a surrogate child to both of us) safely out of the house, bringing only my purse with my wallet and cellphone in it, the phone's battery charger in case that phone became our primary means of communication for a while, and yes, my knitting bag with a couple of socks-in-progress and half a dozen balls of chunky wool and bulky alpaca, both of which are in the process of deciding what they want to become. I have my priorities straight.

Addendum: The cause of the blaze hasn't been established. The fire was quickly subdued by the capable actions of fire personnel, with damage to only the one house at the end of our row. Tragically, there was one fatality, most likely due to smoke inhalation. We lost a neighbour, a woman in her sixties whom I did not know, though another neighbour has said he knows her son. I feel oddly sad in a surreal sort of way. She died less than fifty feet away from me. I wish I had known her.