Don: “I read a blog article once about doing the dishes the night before setting out on a road trip…”

Linda “That was when I was young and idealistic.” ;)

Yeah, we’re still here. The smoke all blew away and it was a gorgeous day to be around here, and we weren’t quite finished with our projects. The smoke came back tonight, so we won’t be as reluctant to leave then. ;)

It’s a law amongst travelers that one never leaves when one says one will. ;)

Still, the big Moon fire was contained at the weekend and the Motion Fire is 90% contained as of this morning. That’s good news! We are heading down the hill later today to do shopping since we have run out of just about everything–paper towels, bog roll, cat litter, food, photos of the day, you name it. ;) We’ll go right by that area and it will be interesting to see what’s up.

For those who are interested, I’m getting my news both from the Redding newspaper and this federal page.

Last night was a hoot! We went to a dinner party at Kerry’s place. Tina and Ed, our neighbors (we keep bumping into them in Weaverville), their teenaged daughter, and Kerry’s biker friend Pete were there. We had tri-tip on the BBQ, salad, sir-fry with squash from the garden, and lots of great conversation. Such fun! As everybody appeared to have fun, I think we’ll do that again. One particular interestingness was the topic of mosquitos and salmon.

Both Tina and Ed work with government agencies involved in the reversion of the Trinity River to its natural state, a balancing act which is helping save the salmon but is also increasing the mosquito population. Everything is tied together of course…remove the invasive species, and the bees don’t find as much to browse, the birds don’t find as much to eat…they’re used to these invasive species, they have adapted.

Making it all work is worse than balancing a checkbook. ;)

But I still like it here. Even though I’m tired of being injected with mosquito spit. ;)

Estimated containment date for the fires is 15th August.

Don is getting there with the internet telephony.

It’s cooled down considerably, the smoke is awful, and it’s quite windy. I can’t ride my bike now because both front and rear brake pads decided to wear down simultaneously. So one of the errands we need to run in Redding is to find the bike shop and get new pads.

I’m not going to go down to Redding–the air has been nasty for two days now and is going to be worse down there–but you can compulsively hit reload here if you want to get updates. (Though it must be said it’s not been updated since 11:30 and the comments are full of idiot trolls.)

In other news, four deer wandered nonchalantly right by Beastie this morning. Beastie is parked right outside our door. Fantastic. :)

I feel a certain empathy with that guy every time we run the macerator on the black tank. Essentially, a macerator is a fitting that one hooks onto the pre-existing valves which open and close to release matter from the black and gray water tanks. It chomps the material and pumps it down a regularly-sized heavy-duty hosepipe into the septic tank.

It’s actually pretty efficient, but the person who opens the valve is treated to a blast of fermented gases and then that odor wafts through the rig until we dump more chemicals down the toilet. Feh! The first time I experienced it I said it smelled like a thousand farts.

Don seemed to find this highly amusing. ;)

A nuthatch or tree creeper bobbled up and down a Christmas tree

Two flycatchers perched on two adjacent fence posts and looked at me

A yellow-bellied bird perched on the wire between said fence posts and looked at me

Another bird, possibly a swallow, perched on the apex of a twig in the tree opposite…and looked at me.

A bird that looked like a size-large blue tit puttered around in the tree, feeding its equally size-large, flying-capable baby.

That is all.

Wanted: RAIN

Down River and Hayfork would like rain, if anyone has any send it our way thanks

And this little RV, shorter than ours, is for sale at the Nu-Tu-Yu (grin!) dealership. It looks to be about 22′, and is probably more within our price range. Not that we’re thinking of replacing Harvey, you understand.