Okay, time flies. I don't have to tell you that. I was thinking about how it was to be young, even 30 years old, when time went much slower than it does now. If you are 30 or 40 today and thinking time flies, just you wait 20 years and it will be a blur.

A couple days ago it finally warmed up around here and it was sunny and hot all day. Along about 8:30 the sun was going down and the sky was such that the air was turned golden. I looked next door and the roof on that house was golden, and the bushes and trees were golden. Then I heard a noise - what's that? It was thunder. The sky was blue where I was looking, but there was thunder.

It turned into a big scary storm that stuck around for a couple of hours with continuous horizontal lightning and thunder crashes. The rain poured down, and we were reminded of the big flash flood here 33 years ago that killed 147 (or so) people. In the middle of this big storm, a huge bolt of lightning illuminated our yard, and we saw a mule deer doe and two tiny, tiny fawns making their way across the yard toward the bridge. The little ones were probably only a day or two old, and they all looked so scared they didn't know which way to run. We watched their progress in the lightning flashes, and it was like watching the Bambi movie - very moving. One of them was making a cawing noise, not frantic, just steady. I'm sure the mother decided it was going to be safer in the long grass across the river instead of up on the mountainside where it's rocky and there are a lot of single trees.

During the storm I looked at a website camera located in the flat lands east of here, pointed this way. It looks like a volcanic eruption. We are in the part that is golden.



Several people we've talked to since that storm have commented on how much it was like that disastrous storm all those years ago.

The day after the storm some people from Texas showed up here. They have a cabin down the river east of here and most of their land is on the other side of the river from their cabin. There used to be a bridge but it got washed out 33 years ago, so in order to hike on their land they have to wade through the river, which isn't an easy task. They decided to come over here and ask to go through our land to get to theirs. There is a waterfall about a mile from our place that is on their land and they wanted to visit it. It's funny to meet people who have been visiting the waterfall all their lives, just as we have been visiting it, and we never met them before. They invited us to come see their place, and we definitely will.

I'm still trying out new recipes. The latest is a sourdough starter and bread from that came out really good. It doesn't taste like sourdough, it just tastes like really good homemade bread. Next will be some sourdough pancakes from the starter.