In which I actually had breaking local news to share, but my favorite way of spreading it was down.

Last night, Teh BF and I went out to Kelly’s in Milton-Freewater, OR for a change of pace. We had fried food and a couple of cocktails and it was pretty fun…

…for awhile. But then the place started to reek like burning garbage, and shortly after that it started to reek like burning plastic! Very toxic, nasty, terrible-smelling burning plastic.

Apparently the diesel place two doors down? Was on fire.

A few minutes later we couldn’t stand the stench any longer, so we polished off our drinks and tabbed out.

As we were pulling out of the bar’s parking lot, gaping at the massive column of smoke rising from the Morton building two doors down, I pulled out my cell phone and Twittered, “The diesel place two doors south of Kelly’s in M-F is currently on fire,” thinking that @Carlos72 over at The U-B might like to know about it (as a reporter, he uses Twitter to keep up with local breaking news).

Then this morning I checked Twitter and saw this:

Yeah, that’s right: no activity on my account for fourteen hours! Which is utterly unheard of, since I’m following 63 people around the world, with several time zones covered. There’s never more than an hour without some sort of tweet! Never!

The four tweets I sent last night – two from my phone, one from my iPod, and one from my netbook – don’t exist anywhere. The Twitter blog mentions this outage not at all. Their status page sorta-kinda references it, but not with much clarity.

I’ve never had this kind of problem with Twitter before, so I guess it was just my turn. *sigh*

Update: Wow! Within ten minutes of posting this, all my missing stuff reappeared in my feed (not on my Twitter page, though)! So: yay! Color me impressed. Er, partially impressed.