Garden Hose

A Manchester volunteer firefighter, who was close to a burning house when he heard the alarm, held the fire at bay with a garden hose until reinforcements arrived yesterday."

A 31-year-old Finksburg woman was seriously injured when a fire caused extensive damage to her home at about 11 a.m. yesterday.Authorities identified the woman as Charlene Davis Harliss of the 2800 block of Baltimore Blvd.Vincent Fannon and Brian Hopkins, members of the Reisterstown Volunteer Fire Department who were working next door, smelled smoke and ran to the house.They tended the victim and tried to fight the fire with a garden hose until medics and other firefighters arrived.Medics from the Gamber Volunteer Fire Company responded within a few minutes to calls Mr. Hopkins and another man made on their cellular phones, Mr. Hopkins said.

As you are probably aware, South Florida recently experienced a bad hurricane. So today, as a South Florida homeowner, I want to review some of the lessons I learned from this experience -- lessons that I believe can be useful not only in hurricanes, but in other natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and children's birthday parties.The most important precaution, for a homeowner facing a natural disaster, is:1. Sell your house before the natural disaster occurs.Trust me, this simple step will save you a lot of trouble.

The alarm rings ridiculously early, at 5:30 a.m. But I spring out of bed as if late for work.My wife yawns, frowns and yawns again."Whazzamadda?" she says."

It is almost spring. It is Saturday. I am trying to push myself away from the breakfast table and go stuff a hose up a downspout. Or slap some sealer on the basement walls. Or map some electrical circuits.These are activities that motivated home-maintenance types are supposed to be doing this time of year. I know because I read it in the "Season-by-Season Guide to Home Maintenance" written by John Warde ($25, Times Books). In this just-released book, Warde, a home improvement columnist for the New York Times, arranges household projects by the seasons of the year.

A Dayton man was arrested Saturday and charged with attempting to rob a motorist, who was choked with a garden hose after giving the suspect a ride in his car, county police said.Kenneth Lee Hammond, 31, of the 5000 block of Greenbridge Road was charged with attempted robbery with a deadly weapon and battery after the 12:45 a.m. incident,police said.The victim, a 23-year-old Dayton man, reported that he picked up Hammond and another man at about 12:15 a.m. after one of them flaggeddown his car in the area of Ten Oaks Road near Greenbridge Road in Dayton.

I WAS enjoying dinner in a nice restaurant with an old friend and his very pregnant wife when suddenly the conversation took an ominous turn."We're videotaping the birth of our child," my friend said proudly.I waited for his wife to reach over and crack him on the skull with the pepper grinder and say, "Over my dead body, sport."Instead, she flashed an eerie Stepford Wives-like smile and chirped: "Yes, it'll be so exciting!"So it's come to this, I thought. My social life has declined to such a level that I am actually keeping company in a cheap Mexican joint with a madman and his equally unstable wife.

There is nothing like a drought to really test a gardener's green thumb.For instance, my garden would have fried recently during a horrid dry spell, were it not for the thumb I kept pressed to the garden hose.Every day of the drought, I spent an hour watering thirsty plants -- 30 minutes each morning and 30 more at night. The personal sacrifices were enormous. I didn't watch "Jeopardy!" for a month.During a drought, mornings become monotonous: I stagger outside at dawn and haul the hose to another part of the garden, 100 feet from the house.

Sometimes I want to rope off the back yard and sell tickets to the carnival that goes on there. It shouldn't be difficult. The events change daily.Last week, for instance, I arrived home to find the dog perched atop an 8-foot compost heap, rabbits eating the fruit trees and my wife dancing around the lawn, chirping and flapping her arms like a bird.The county fair can't top this, I thought.I circled the block twice to make sure I had the right house. Egad, I had.My arrival had little effect on the strange scene.

They hosed him down and flushed him out.After nearly four hours of trying to coax a robbery and kidnapping suspect out from under a wooden porch in Woodmoor yesterday, Baltimore County police unleashed their most potent weapon -- a garden hose.The armed man -- wanted for the robbery of a Northwest Baltimore clothing store that led to an abduction and a running gunbattle with police -- hid under the low wooden porch on Hillsmere Road just before noon.He was holding a stainless steel, long-barreled .44-caliber Magnum at the time.