July 5th, 2006

Sunday:
I got up at 5 am and made 5 batches of bread for our pig roast party we had. We ended up with quite a few people. It was my first pig roast and it was pretty fun. I invited and met my long time friend's #5 sister (there are 11 sisters and 1 brother) as she just moved to town and I invited her as well to our pig roast.

It was SOOOOOOOOOO hot Sunday.. and no grass lawns here yet due to the lack of rain. I have been watching the skies for thunderstorms. We do not need lightening.. it is way too dry out there.We get a call that my bf's job is shut down due to fire danger. He is off work for a week.

Monday:

Our company left, I think they had an excellent 8 days here. Due to it being so hot the last couple of days here, we all decided to go to the river and play all day. We took a huge cooler full of leftover food from the pig roast and some people from the party the day before joined us. Swimming felt awesome. The water is very warm there after the initial plunge. We heard thunder booming miles away and it echoed in the canyon. I came out of the water about that point for awhile. We tried our hands at gold panning and the people who were with us are rock hounds and jewelry makers and so we were finding all sorts of lovely stones.I GOT BURNT!! I never burn, but I was watching my legs carefully and not my back. I am going to peel on this one.

We took the water tank and we went to the well at my bf's shop and brought home 400 gallons of water and we finally got to water the garden after a week of not watering it. For the lack of water, the garden is actually looking quite fine, though I know it would look better with MORE waterings.

At the well while I was holding the fire hose in the tank I noticed these HUGE cumulus clouds.. but they looked funny to me. On the drive home I was still watching them and then realized that they were huge wildfires. The one side of the 'cloud' was too flat on one side and looked like when Mt St Helen's exploded the first time in 1980.. that cauliflower effect.. and the drift of the smoke you could see was brown the closer we got.

One of my biggest fears up here is wildfires. Lightening evidently set off 22 of them in our district on Sunday night. "Kid" and I went to a friends house out that direction as we could not get her on the phone and she did not realize that there was a fire less than 15 miles out her back door. There are too many trees too close to her house for her to have seen it.

We scooped her up and went to go track the fire and we stopped at a local store which is the only place out there as we figured that they would know. All we could get for size of the fire is "We don't know yet, but it is HUGE".. from their description of where it is, it is only about 30-40 miles from our cabin.

My bf had me call a couple people to be able to put them on standby for helping us haul our livestock and we have a place to store the horses and poultry (it is a good friend who would let you dump 51 chickens and 5 turkeys at their house in a millisecond). Pictures and books would be some of the top priorities which would be hauled off. Thinking of putting the horses in the smaller front pasture so it is easier to catch them VS on the 37 acre pasture.I think more wildlife is moving this way. The dogs were set off all night. We will have to watch for predators even more now.

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