Looks like I'm on an end of the whatever thread here. It has been quite a week with the nearby forest fire that started Sunday morning. I spent a lot of my days watching the news and reading fire updates on the Internet. I googled up some checklists of how to get the house ready for a fire.

Basically, you do what you can to make it easier for the fire fighters to defend your house. This means leaving the doors unlocked, the chain saw and tools like shovels and rakes sitting out in front. They say to close all the interior doors and move furniture away from the windows and shut off the propane to the house. You go around and take pictures of everything and assemble your important papers. All my documents are scanned and stored on DVD, but I still wanted to save some of the originals of historical records related to the house, and I found the building plans from the 1980s when it was remodeled to transform the cabin to a house. And of course all the family photos dating back to the 1880s. There are five boxes of them, all sorted into large envelopes by family.

Now that the fire is almost under control and we're safe for now. I'm putting things back, and taking this opportunity to organize the office a little better. This morning I'm washing the kitchen ceiling with oven cleaner. It really cuts through the grease, and I love cleaning when I can see immediate results. But I have to take breaks to get over breathing in the fumes.

That's what I'm doing right now: taking a break to talk to you. But now, back to work.

This is from earlier this summer, the female hairy woodpecker who visited the hummingbird feeders every day for awhile. They have really long tongues and can easily get into where the juice is.