Starting Your Holidays Off With A Bang, CAI, Inc.

Woke up at 2:45 am to the loudest bang I've ever heard and the house shaking. It stopped after about 3 seconds and I waited for either the baby to start wailing, or the ceiling to cave in or both. Neither happened. About 10 minutes later, Chris's friend called from Danvers and asked if we had felt it too. He said that he could see flames shooting up behind the trees about a quarter mile away from his house. I ran outside and from the back yard I could see a huge orange glow about a mile away and black smoke billowing up. We thought a plane had crashed.

It turned out to be an explosion that levelled a chemical plant that makes inks and solvents. It was a huge relief to find out that no one had been killed. It was almost impossible to go back to sleep not knowing what was going on and not knowing how bad the fire was or where it was.

Starting Your Holidays Off With A Bang, CAI, Inc.

Yay! It's November again!

Chloe on Essex St. November 5, 2006

Sorry, I've been so busy dodging stoned adults wandering through town in cloaks and tall pointy hats, trying to find parking so I can get some errands done, struggling to take the baby out for a walk in wall-to-wall people and answering questions like, "Are you a witch?" "Do you know where all the historical stuff is?" and "Where can I find a bathroom?" that I have left this blog sadly neglected. I swear I could even hear it whimpering at night from loneliness. I thought it would be great to spend October writing about all the great stuff there is to do in Salem during the month leading up to Halloween but...

1) There's a lot about this already on the web. Do you really need another site telling you to take a tour of "haunted Salem"?

2) Salem gets so insanely crowded that every weekend in October is a two day nightmare of crawling gridlock and jam packed stores. I could not subject anyone else to that with a clear conscience.

3) A six month old baby (see above photo) doesn't really know about goblins or candy or 300 pound women dressed like goth/renaissance hookers yet, so why not enjoy the innocence while it lasts? I took her to the big annual Halloween parade, she wore a lobster costume, looked adorable, and fell back asleep the second the parade was over. It's probably the easiest Halloween I'll ever have again.

And now it's November. Salemites have taken their streets back again. Last weekend it was absolutely gorgeous out and I loved being able to walk around my neighborhood without feeling like attaching a cow catcher to the front of Chloe's carriage. Stores are virtually empty, and the trees are in the final throes of fall foliage madness. So I'm going to enjoy every minute.

Yay! It's November again!