That preacher in Footloose was right. Dancing leads to death.

Yesterday I took to my bed with illness. Comforted by a novel and a cup of tea, I spent most of last evening and this morning nursing my self back to wellness by reading and resting my eyes under slices of cucumber.

Mondo kept a constant vigil, obviously concerned for my health.

As I was lounging, I passed the time doing sudoku and reading the Wikipedia pages of Emily Dickinson, Bob Vila, and Tim Gunn.

At approximately 10am this morning, I decided I was tired of being old before my time, out of touch with coolness, and needed to immerse myself in pop culture so I could feel young again.

Which is how I spent the better part of the day watching Gangnam Style videos on Youtube.

It was during this immersion into the music style of the youths today, that I first heard the ice cream truck outside of the house playing music OVER and OVER and OVER again.

IK wasn't home, and we don't have neighbor kids to buy ice cream, so that struck me as a little weird.

And then the dogs started barking. OVER and OVER and OVER again. Continuously. My usual trick of standing at the bottom of the stairs and yelling for Mondo and Seeley didn't work.

I paused my Korean dance party to go upstairs to figure out what in the high hell was going on.

I opened the door, expecting the mail lady to be at the door. But instead was greeted by a strange woman.

"Um. Your lawn is on fire."

And it sure was.

The ice cream van, not a truck as it turns out, was driving by and the two women inside it noticed flames coming from the lawn. They jumped out and used towels and jackets to put out the grass fire.

It was still smoldering, as I looked past the woman's shoulder, to the blackened lawn.

These dudes visited and sprayed down the yard.

It was quite obviously started by a cigarette butt flicked onto the lawn. We even found the butt. So thank you to the passerby who felt the need to discard their cigarette onto our lawn thus starting the fire.

I'm pretty sure I aged ten years in the space of ten minutes.

Had they not stopped, there is the very real possibility the burn would've moved up towards the house and deck and then onto the house itself. I would not have noticed. The basement is pretty soundproof to anything outside the walls of the house (save Mondo's barking).

Instead, while the house went up in flames, I would spend my final minutes having a dance party in my pajamas.

Gangnam Style.