Recovery - Sorta...

Some of the plants are starting to come around and some are still getting worse. The leafy plants and trees have lost their leafs or will with a good wind. The evergreens needles are all brown and looking dead, but I think the trees will survive. The lawn is actually starting to get green again - a little here and there. So, it is what it is, but it is better than I first expected...

This Friday night, we had some neighbors over for dinner - Boyd and Annette. He is the president of the home owners association and told us of many strange, but scary, firestorm stories. One neighbor had a trailered fishing boat in his driveway that Boyd saw spinning around in the wind as we was going to other neighbor's houses that were on vacation and turning on their sprinklers. He said that if you looked up, you could see lawn chairs, tables and all sort of stuff spinning around 300 to 400 feet up in the air in the storm wind.

He also reminded me of the fire planes. When I got home, there were all these little, very loud, planes, that reminded me of the WWII fighters in size that were flying all over the neighborhood real low and loud. They were dropping this orange stuff on the ground to keep the fire contained. At the time I was too busy with other stuff to check them out much, but it was pretty amazing. Sorta like in a couple of scenes in Pearl Harbor with the fighters going around the ships.

We had a great dinner for Annette's birthday. Boyd is a big steak eater so I fixed some large rib eyes for us and a couple of fillets for the birthday girls. Pam made Bearnaise sauce, and a salad, and I made a great rice dish and we had some of Costco's best bread and flavored oils. All the steaks came out as ordered, which is challenging when they were 3 different thicknesses of meat, done to three different styles. But, that is why it takes and 'expert'...

I am in charge of cooking all the meat for Storm and Jenny's wedding this weekend since they have tasted my work before, which should be challenging but fun working in a real professional equipped kitchen.

Then, Saturday morning, too early, Pam had to be off to setup for the annual Dell family picnic. She was on the committee to make it happen. She took down a couple of those pop up shades, she borrowed from Boyd, her Karaoke machine and lots of other stuff. I came later, about 10am, and brought the salads and lots of other stuff. It was quite an event. They had dunk tanks, blowup jump things for the kids, a train ride, snow cone machine lots of good food, tattoos, a good raffle and bingo. Pam spent most of the day calling bingo with the Karaoke machine as loudspeaker. There were probably 20 picnic sized permanent tables and benches in this covered area that were full of bingo players most of the day. She has played bingo a lot in some previous life. She knew all sorts of very strange bingo games that everybody loved.

It was very hot all day, in the 100-106 degree category, but there were lots of dell families there most of the day having big fun and wining all sorts of great prizes. It lasted until about 3pm. Then we had to clean it all up and put everything away. That lasted until about 4:30 or so.

Then, we had to race home to put some stuff in the freezer and race off to another friend's wedding. They are fishing and pool playing buddies of mine. His family is one of the local, long term pool playing families of the area. Most of the local good players, along with all the operators of the pool playing establishments were there. It was a very nice outdoor ceremony but was too hot. We left about 8pm, or so, to come back to a very hot house. I guess the Air Conditioning unit froze up during the very hot day and it took me a few hours to get it working correctly again.

Then, early Sunday morning, about 7am, I was woken up by hammering on the roof, just above the bedroom... The roofer was here fixing our roof that had been torn up by the firestorm. He was up there banging around for about 2 hours. Pam mostly slept through it, or at least didn't move much. But, after it was over she could barley talk and had been coughing all night. So, after I did my yoga, I went into town and got her some throat/cough/cold meds. I told the pharmacist that she had a bad case of Bingo, which she was confused about, but thought it was pretty funny with some explanation. Anyway, after recovering most of the day, Pam is all better and somewhat rested after a very busy and action packed weekend here in DaHo...