July 08, 2006

hank you to everyone who has been emailing both myself and jon to check up on us..

This is the fire update...

It rained last night as well as a severe thunderstorm. The rains did not do alot for the fire directly, but indirectly, the air temperatures went from 41C to 14C within 2 hours.. so it cooled things off immensely and the humidity is up, so it will slow the fire. However, the thunderstorms probably produced alot more spot fires. On our way back from my friend "A"'s place which is even closer to the fires than we are.. we went as far as we could until the road block and the fire is still 7 miles from her place. I am 12 miles from "A"'s cabin. So we have an approximate 19 mile buffer between us and the fire/s.

On our way back to my house last night, we reported a spot fire probably caused by the lightening storm. They were going to go out and investigate it today.

We have 2 main fires to be concerned about, though there are over 100 wildfires started since last Monday in our district. The largest one is about 50,000 acres and the other one is about 23,000 acres.. the smaller one is  the one closet to us and it is holding. The other one is out of control and wicked  enough they are not fighting it. They are letting it burn as it is not an interface fire (bothering humans). They just got firefighters last night and today on the one closer to us.

There still is nothing on the news or in the papers about us.. even the government  website has not updated in a couple days. My bf's aunt works at the forestry and we are getting most of our info from her, she calls us and updates us twice daily..

We are 2 miles outside the 2 hour evacuation warning zone. We are prepared to be out of here, including livestock within that time. We brought the horses to the front pasture and tossed round bales in there for them to eat so we do not have to deal with finding them in the back 40. The chickens all have their right wing trimmed as the place we have planned to move them to, only has a 5 ft fence and these guys have cleared the 7 ft fence here. Cages are ready to put them into in case we need to leave.

We have located places to store the goat, cats, rabbit, goose, chickens, turkeys, sleddogs, hogs and horses. No one will be left behind. We have stocktrailers and trucks in our driveway on standby.

Neither of the fires are.

Blessings with the wildfires is... that they are not effecting homes yet, only bushland forests which have so much bug kill in them, it will help clean the forest and also make next year a lesser of a fire hazard for us. Morel mushrooms are certain to sprout up next year and Fireweed will be one of the first things to bloom. If you have never had Fireweed honey. It is a rare treat.. pure water clear  it is , with a light taste.

It could be way worse.. so I am not complaining about the fire situation as it is..

It is nice today as we are not breathing smoke for the 1st time since Monday.

I just got an update on the wildfire we reported last night and it has doubled in size.

Evening Update

tayed near home again today. Puttered out in the garden and got some weeding done, since I have neglected that chore for about 2 weeks, it was not nearly as bad as it would have been without the new watering system we set up. With no rains and water only going where it needed to go, the weeds were minimal. With 3 of us, the weeding chore only took about an hour. One pea and one raspberry sorta were weeded out.. and there was alot of calling to me to ID each weed for sure.. well not each weed.. but alot of them.

I think I mentioned our well is not up to what we require of it, so we will be drilling a new well. I have basically not watered my garden for 2 weeks so we can have water in the house. I water the greenhouse every 3-5 days.. surprisingly enough nothing has died and it is actually looking very good even though we have had such ugly heat there for awhile. The peas are starting to set pods, the cukes flowers and the lettuce is looking delicious and ready to pick tomorrow. When we get a new well, the current well will be deeded as the garden well.

I got a 3 hour nap this afternoon... probably well deserved. I went to read to do a little reseach and I woke up with the cat perched on my hip as I lay on my side.. better than my head I guess.

Since I slept until well past dinnertime, homemade ravioli was not in the equasion, so I made a one pot meal of rice, veggies and chicken which was not the delicious dinner we had been hoping to have, but all in all it was quite tasty. We had been drooling over the thought of homemade Ravioli all day.

The fires are slowing compared to the constant doubling for days.. today was the first day we have not breathed smoke since Monday.