an unexpected day off

I awoke this morning at 5:41 to my phone ringing. I was very much out of it, but listened to the message a bit later. It was one of my team leaders at school saying that school had been canceled for today. You can read the story here.

Apparently a man walked into a 24-hour Vet Clinic just across the street from our school at 2 in the morning and took 5 people hostage. By 6:30 the hostages had been released, but the gunman was still in the clinic.

In addition to it being extremely unsafe for us to be at school with a crazy man running around (ok, he was contained, and ok, there are crazies running around all of the time), police had barracaded off the street blocks surrounding, including our school.

There's been no word on if we have calamity days scheduled in, or if we will have to make up this day (boo). The barricade has since been lifted which means I will still be able to attend my meeting tonight at 6pm (phew .. dripping with sarcasm).

Also in other news, an LDS church in Mesa was burned to the ground last night. You can read the story here. Apparently they had a fireside (no fire involved) last night and used the kitchen, but they only had ice cream sundaes. From what I understand, the fire they think was started near the kitchen, but it burned too fast and too hot to be able to discern where exactly it was coming from. I guess it's sounding a bit suspicious because about a month ago that same church building was broken into and "vandalized," which I later found out involved whoever broke in was going through paperwork and church records (eep!).

And lastly, our school's football team had made it to the second game of the playoffs but was beat by Mingus (not to be confused with a character from Harry Potter).