Corgi saves the barn

Yesterday afternoon, I found a huge spider huddled in the dog room. I had noticed it a couple of weeks ago, but I thought it was a glob of Bill’s drool adorned with Alice’s black fur until I saw it had moved. The dog room has been kept quite cold for Alice. I suspect the spider was too cold to move about. The room warmed up after I opened the door for Wally, so he wouldn’t have to use the indoor dog door. Anyway, I couldn’t kill the spider. I scooped it up in a Dixie cup, gave it to Mark, and asked him to relocate it to the shop. He shuffled outside with his cup of spider, but decided to rehome his eight-legged friend in the barn. One of our security cameras was offline, so he thought he’d kill two birds with one stone, release the spider and reset the camera. As I watched him head for the barn, I decided to take the dogs out a bit earlier than usual. Since Mark was outside, I’d have company while Bill gnawed on trees and Alice lounged in the yard.

While I sat on the bench by the barn and Mark fiddled with camera wires, I could hear an odd sound. It sounded like water, but that made no sense. The faint sound was coming from the stall where we store our firewood. I called Mark over for help identifying the sound, just as I saw a little puff of smoke. Mark went into the wood stall and found an extension cord sizzling and sparking as it short-circuited. It was tucked between the wood splitter and the barn wall. Mark pulled it out. It was so hot that the plastic end had started to melt. We could’ve very quickly lost the barn to fire.

We happened to be at the barn and witnessed the ignition through a few coincidental events. Had Wally not been visiting causing me to open the door and warm the dog room… had the spider not moved to a new spot… had I not noticed the spider when I did… had Mark not decided to go to the barn instead of the shop… had I not decided to take the dogs out when I did… had I not sat on the bench instead of walking around… and had I not heard the sizzling wire… we might have had an enormous fire. We were very fortunate. The wire could’ve sparked in the middle of the night. So many “ifs”. To make a long story shorter… a little Corgi saved our barn.