Year of the Fire Horse

This past February 17 was Lunar New Year, transitioning from the Year of the Wood Snake to that of the Fire Horse. The Chinese Zodiac includes 12 animals and 5 elements. My mother turned 60 in 2025 which means that, for the first time since she was born, it was her animal-element combination. This should have brought great fortune, and things were going pretty well for her, until she got hit by a car, broke her leg, and got chased out of her home due to fire for the second time in a year and a half.

When I was young, maybe around ten, I had this book of Astrology which merged the Western and Eastern variants. In it, it said that the Year of the Fire Horse was considered to be the most intimidating of the 60 combinations. Apparently this was true to the point that people in China would avoid having children during this time, as those offspring would be fated either to greatness or destruction. While the Fire Horse isn't necessarily bad, it tends to evoke a sense of fear moreso than opportunity.

Considering the hardships that my family has undergone and the current state of the world, I would prefer a calm and boring year to a dynamic, high-energy one. 

Here is an article with some details on the fire that occured in my mother and brother's building:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/kitchener/article/suspicious-fire-set-in-kitchener-parking-garage-police/

In my last update, the incident was considered "not suspicious". However, since then the fire department has conducted an invesitgation and now the most likely cause is thought to be arson. The building is now conducting repairs and clearing out smoke. The damage was more advanced than their previous estimate, and so they're thinking it will be another three to four weeks before residents can move back in.

This building has operated in a much more thoughtful way than the place in Guelph did. They've provided hotel rooms to anyone that wasn't able to stay with friends of family. Now that things are looking to take a little longer than expected, they have upgrading those people to rooms with full kitchen facilities.

Apparently even though the apartments were not considered habitable by humans, they allowed people to keep their pets there. Although now they are saying that people need to find alternative sheltering options for them as they go through the units to clean them individually.

The building advertises itself as pet-friendly. When everyone evacuated, I saw many dogs and cats. I have to wonder what it looked like when they opened up the Social Room in a neighbouring building to shelter the tenants in the wake of the fire. It must have been a zoo in there. I have to imagine that the chances of some animals reacting poorly to each other was high.

Apparently all humans escaped the building in relatively good health. There were two injuries and one person was hospitalized, but is now fine. I wonder if all the pets were similarly fortunate. Articles have not mentioned this, unlike the fire in Guelph, where they did report on the two cat fatalities between the eight living there.

Since the incident, it has occurred to me that there was an additional layer of awkwardness to the situation which thankfully didn't manifest. You might remember that, a few years ago I facilitated de-escalation training to all the firefighters in Kitchener. The chances of them coming in while I was saving the cats, and needing to implement the same training I'd provided for them, on me now in a state of escalation, was non-zero.

It's tough because in neither incident were my mother or brother in any way at fault. They didn't install the air conditioner that exploded on the house in Guelph, and they didn't light the car on fire at their current location. This is gratifying on a moral level, but on the other side of things, it means that there's nothing really to learn and therefor, no way to prevent it from happening again. One might say that the same thing happening to them again is highly unlikely, but when lightning has already struck twice, it seems less improbable. Besides, if we're looking at my network as a whole, this is the third strike. I'll tell that story in a future post.

The first time, they were staying in a low-rent location that was independently owned and poorly maintained. But now they were living in a fairly professional location and it still happened. 

It's difficult to reconcile oneself with the fact that, every night when you fall asleep, you are relying on everyone choosing not to light your house on fire. Because anyone can do it, and there's nothing you can do to prepare. It's hard not to imagine how it would be more difficult to escort my mother with her still-faulty leg up a flight of stairs to get outside, and to evacuate four cats instead of just two.