pull the pin

There was a big ol' explosion in downtown Greensboro last night.

Nobody was staked out with a camera waiting for things to blow up, so here's a gas man looking around after. Courtesy News & Record.

We're fine, as you may have gathered from the fact that I am blogging calmly about it with nary a capslock sentence in sight.

Brandon and I heard the blast when it happened, but had no idea what it was. Brandon thought it was a big car accident, but I thought it sounded more like a crane had hoisted an empty Dumpster into the air and then dropped it. (One of us is dramatic, can you tell?)

We didn't hear any commotion after, but I checked Twitter a little later and saw that police cars and fire trucks had closed down an intersection about four blocks from our house.

Apparently a malfunction with underground wiring caused something to blow up, throwing two manhole covers into the air. Nobody was hurt, but some windows exploded, and cars parked near the site were pretty badly damaged (RIP this one in particular). Downtown was allegedly evacuated afterward, but nobody told us, so basically we just sat there drinking wine while chaos reigned down the road. Am I the best reporter ever, or what?

In my defense, I did use my media cred to get some details by emailing the night editor to find out what was happening, but at that point all they knew was that something had detonated. (Actual quote from a police officer: "This is a confusing situation." It really was, sir.)

I relayed this information to Brandon, who GPS'd the location on his phone and informed me that earlier, while running with Maisy, he had totally passed a guy standing on that exact corner holding what looked like a grenade.

"Seriously. And he was wearing cowboy boots, and I thought he looked weird, so we turned the corner to get away from him," he told me.

I was unmoved by this story, mostly because Brandon took Maisy out around 2 p.m. and the explosion happened nearly eight hours later. Also because when pressed for more details, Brandon could not say definitively that the grenade - which the guy found on the ground - was not, in fact, a pine cone. 

Today I asked him if he could draw an MS Paint reenactment to help me better tell this harrowing story. This is what he gave me:

(I cannot stop laughing. I'm so happy to be tied to Brandon for life. Also, I was not aware there were spurs involved, or that our pit bull mix is actually a sawhorse. When pressed for details again, Brandon just said, "Yep, that's pretty much exactly how it happened.")

Despite my skepticism, I sent the hot news tip to the night editor. Just in case, you know?

Actual email chain:

From: Kate
To: night editor
Also Brandon thinks he saw a guy with a grenade this morning, which is completely useless information unless they tell you it was a grenade

From: night editor
To: Kate
That's wild. Well, you never know....

From: Kate
To: night editor
I mean he saw this guy eight hours ago so it would have to be quite the slow-acting "grenade"

From: night editor
To: Kate
Of course, he could have thought about it a long time.

I really fit in at work, y'all.

Anyway, everything's fine, with the exception of that one car that got kind of destroyed, one potentially paranoid husband living in my house, and, apparently, a grenade-toting cowboy roaming the streets of Greensboro.

(You can read more about the weird explosion over here.)