Starts Off With a Bang

So there I was, minding my own business, fast asleep dreaming some silly dream, when at about 2:50 this morning, a loud BOOOOOOM!! woke me up. The whole house shook for several seconds. And then all was quiet. I sat up, trying to figure out what was going and then the phone rang; it was my mother-in-law, calling my wife, who was already downstairs. I ran downstairs and we scrambled around the house trying to figure out what happened. The girls, meanwhile, slept right through it; step on the wrong stair and the creak will wake Lily up, but a massive noise and house-shaking, nothing. The street was calm and dark, lights in most houses were out, and there was no sign that anything was amiss. We continued looking around when we saw one of our neighbors outside with a flashlight; he said he felt the same thing we did and thought his furnace had blown, but it was fine. Just then a fire engine went racing by with its flashing lights on. We went back inside. Deb and her mom were wide awake and decided to drive around and see if they could find out what happened. I stayed home with the kids and tried to get some more sleep, but my mind was racing as I thought it could have been a small plane crash (we have a small airport nearby).

I woke up at 6 to my alarm and Deb told me we felt an explosion at a Danvers chemical plant about three miles from our house. Turns out people felt it as far as 30 miles away, thinking it was an earthquake. Nobody was killed and only 10 were injured, but it looks a bunch of people in the area will have to find shelter for Thanksgiving. It's all over the local news right now.

Stuck in Lodi again:

• We're getting ready to host Thanksgiving. Deb's mom is cooking, and our guests will include my mom, Deb's brother Matt and family, and her aunt Marsha and cousin Tim. Matt and I are going to run the Wild Turkey 5-Mile run in Salem tomorrow morning, which gives us license to chow down later.
• I played football with a bunch of guys from work on Saturday and my hamstrings are still sore. It didn't help that the field was pretty slick and muddy after all the rain we got last week. Fun stuff. I was only able to play for an hour of the two-hour game because I had to be home to take the kids, but it was a blast.
• Here's the best kids' soccer team sponsor ever: Motorhead. Lemmy and the boys sponsored a U-10 team in the U.K. Man, my team in the seventh grade was sponsored by my dad's union: our name was something like "Ontario Hydroelectric Engineers Local 312." Catchy.
• Still in shock over the whole Michael Richards meltdown last week at a comedy club, where he lost it and made some nasty racist comments to a couple of hecklers. Unfortunately for him, an audience member had a camcorder and recorded the whole thing, and it made the rounds quickly. It's pretty unbelievable. Jerry Seinfeld was on the Letterman show Monday and had Richards on via satellite to apologize; it was as uncomfortable an interview as you'll ever see. There was some nervous laughter in the Letterman audience as Richards talked; Seinfeld admonished them, saying, "Don't laugh. This isn't funny." Richards seemed sincerely upset at his actions and claimed he wasn't a racist, just angry. Maybe, but that stuff had to come from somewhere. He said he likes perform on the edge and tried to amp it up to make it all sound like a joke, but obviously it didn't work. He's going to have a tough time overcoming his videotaped tirade. He was fairly beloved from his days as Kramer on the Seinfeld show, but he pretty much blew that.