Yesterday I went to another meeting to hear about river restoration after the flood. This one was in my home town, and although I didn't recognize anyone, it was comforting to be among the farmers and small-town type people I grew up with. Then, I spent some hours in a local fly shop chatting with people who came in to buy a book about how to fish in our river being sold as a fund-raiser for the restoration efforts.

These things always leave me wrung out, because the people in charge of our particular river are not having meetings or doing anything to engage our neighbors and get the permissions required for the projects funded by government money to proceed.

We are going to need help removing debris like this and disposing of it. Costs are estimated at $500,000 - $1 million per mile, depending on a variety of factors. Each landowner is going to have to pay 12.5% of this, and I have about .2 of a mile to clean up. Fortunately, we will get credit for work we do ourselves, or work done by volunteers do to help us.



That rock is 8 feet above the river bed, so the top of the debris pile is 25 feet up, the high water mark. I can stand looking at it and picture all that water at the height of the flood.

I also spent a lot of money yesterday: ink for my printer here at home, and a large-capacity backup drive for my computer. The other day I noticed the absence of some files from my main memory stick that I was using for backup, so decided I needed to start a better backup process.