It's hot, dry, and windy: fire weather. Here are where the smoke plumes are, according to the EPA, Monday evening June 11.



Whenever we have a hazy summer day or smell smoke and don't know of any fires in our area, we look at the latest map to see if it's blowing in from afar.

I spend most of my time as the admin of two Facebook groups that have a community building/preparedness mission, spend a lot of time looking for the topic of the day. Here's a couple examples from FEMA:





I'm staying near the computer in case some emailed update comes about a change in the road construction schedule. We get notice of all-night closures of parts of the main highway, then notice that they've been cancelled; really keeps me hopping.

I'm also supposed to be rounding up belongings to take with us in case we have to flee from a wildfire. I have a lot of it together - there's a bag with all the cat's stuff ready to go - but in my bag of clothes, I switched the winter wear for hot weather outfits. I have a feeling if I ever actually need those clothes I'll find about half of what I need - several tops and no jeans or shorts to go with them. Because it's hard to focus in a theoretical situation, I'll have to stage a little rehearsal for myself and pretend the only clothes I have are in that bag.

The family photos is another thing - there's about ten of those white banker's boxes with picture and letters organized by family name. If we get enough notice that fires are in the area, I have a third cousin outside of the forest area where I can take them for safe-keeping. I haven't asked her, but am sure she'll agree.

It looks like Eddie regressed the MyBloggers site to a previous version: the image loader works the way it used to - it's actually better than the supposed better new one we've had for the most recent years, which was much slower to load. The disadvantage is the current one loads only one photo at a time, but I don't mind because it is so much faster.