Take Heed and UNPLUG!!

Well we just returned from a week long vacation in Tahoe, hence the recent lack of blog updates (preparing for vacation, vacationing, then recovering from vacation...) On the drive home from our trip we started thinking about getting back to real life when Micah realized that our DVR was pretty close to maxed out before we left (all those Veggie Tales stored up!), so we were a little concerned we missed our recorded shows (no 24???)!!! Raider went straight to checking it out when we got to the house but for some reason the TV wouldn"t even turn on. After a little investigation we found this behind the TV:

That is the surge protector that held the TV, DVR, DVD, VCR and Wii. Apparently it CAUGHT FIRE while we were gone. You can see here the holes burned through on the bottom of it (they still had sparks coming out of them):

And this is what the TV stand looked like AFTER Micah scrubbed it:

I have heard the statistics about electrical fires and unplugging your electronics when you leave but never really listened. Based on our DVR records it appears the surge protector burned up not more than a couple hours after we left. We are just thankful that our whole house didn't catch fire!! Micah took the surge protector in to work and talked with the Fire Chief about it. He shared this picture of someone else's house that caught fire (this is just the spot where the surge protector was located) and he said we were lucky it wasn't sitting on carpet as the wood luckily didn't burn up before the fire went out. He kept our surge protector to use for training :) Now I have one more thing to be paranoid about!!!! Can you imagine what might have happened to my scrapbooks??? I need to buy a fire safe trunk for those!!