Ok, so I’m a bit behind on posting. I’m also practicing understatements today. So maybe I should do this by months….
August 2024
The storage part of our new garage building was completed.
We didn’t put any windows in this part of the garage as we wanted to be able to heat it in the event we want to use a corner as a cold storage space. That way we can regulate the temperatures with a bit more accuracy.
We have spent the ensuing months moving things from our old funky storage shed into the new storage space. This process was delayed because we have been waiting for the garage part to be insulated and sheet rock installed on the walls, and then everything could be put where it belongs rather than moving things back and forth. And as anybody who knows me, I was very patient about this process.
We had company in August and set up the new room.
More company of the four-legged variety came to visit us in August. One thing we didn’t see was a bear! This is weird. And everybody we talked to said they weren’t seeing any bears either.
Another very cool thing that happens around here in August is… Peaches!!!!! In another couple of years perhaps our peach tree will produce something. It still looks very wimpy.
And I did make a pie.
No pictures of the pie. The crust was somewhat of a disaster and so we ate the evidence very quickly.
We went for a walk by the river during one of the periods when we weren’t being invaded by contractors.
Other entertainment during August was experimenting with recipes and my gluten-free flour.
Yum. The raspberry danish in particular was highly addictive, and I made a couple of batches of this which I froze so they would last longer. These were too good, and high calories, so I have refrained from making more of them for now. But now that I think about it, maybe I should make some more of them.
So August was kind of quiet. The strawberry plants had taken a month off to do some growing, and the weeds had basically taken over the rest of the garden so we didn’t get much done with gardening. This next year will hopefully be a lot better, no contractors cluttering up our lives.
September
Strawberry plants are back in business!
September was mostly of boring. Mainly we harvested strawberries and wondered when the contractors would come back to finish working on our sidewalk, and completing the garage.
We had that for breakfast this morning too, but no tomatoes. Freshly harvested tomatoes are just amazingly wonderful.
And then September 25th happened. I had finished working and a few minutes later the power went off. This wasn’t super surprising as we had been having 40 mph winds all day and the power tends to go out. We figured it was some tree up in Sherman Pass which is where it usually has problems with high winds.
Good timing I thought! It didn’t interfere with me working and my use of the internet. I settled down on the couch and was snuggling with Mish per his demand, trying to help him with his quest for the perfect nap, when the sun sort of got dimmer. How odd, I thought, and I looked out the window to the south.
Dan asked me what wasn’t good as I sounded panicked, and I simply pointed out the window. He went outside to look, came back inside a moment later and said he was getting the travel cages for Oro and Mish, and told me to get some things packed up. The next hour was pretty frantic.
Fresh forest fire smoke is awful, just a terrible smell. And the humidity was extremely low outside. We had been under a red flag warning frequently the last few weeks. Every few minutes I would duck outside and take a new picture, in between trying to think of what to take with us and hoping we could get down the highway or if it was closed due to the fire. It looked like the highway may be an issue.
I tried to call 9-1-1 but because the only cell tower we can reach is in Canada, I reached the Canadian folks and told them about the fire and told them how high the winds were and how fast the fire was moving. They connected me to the Americans who told me they knew about the fire and crews were on their way.
We stopped at the post office to talk to the post master who is our next door neighbor. She told us that the highway was indeed closed to traffic so the only way to get out of here was to cross the river and then take a logging road over the mountains to get to a paved road which would bypass the roadblock, and allow us to get to Republic and hopefully find a motel room to spend the night.
That was one nasty rough road which seemed to be taking forever! Along the way we could see the fire from a different perspective.
The main issue was high winds that day. They drive the fire. Well, not the main issue. The main issue was probably the 15% humidity.
Where we were standing on the bluff above the river was obviously a deep spot in terms of water depth.
I tried to take a movie of this process, him hovering above the water and filling the bucket, but I was shaking too much and not thinking clearly. So the technical process of taking a movie was too much for me to accomplish, apparently. You know, click the video button and then click on the start button. Too hard.
After he left with his tea cup of water we decided to just head for town. A couple of hours later we got to Republic, a process that normally takes 45 minutes. That was a long drive! Oro and Mish couldn’t figure out what we had in mind, or if we had simply lost our minds. I kept telling them we weren’t moving even though I didn’t know if we were going to be moving if the fire destroyed everything.
We got no sleep. Dan would have but I kept waking him up. He deserves a medal or something. The next morning we called our neighbors to find out what had happened. They also got no sleep but they stayed and didn’t evacuate. It was a Level 3 evacuation in our neighborhood for weeks, and most of us stayed. They said the highway was open again but with a pilot car since they were working there, and trees were still coming down and the ground was still hot. The fire had come within 1/4 mile of our house before the winds turned a bit and it headed up into the mountains. And it had rained a bit overnight and the winds died down!!! That was really the saving grace.
We returned home to see how things looked. And shortly after we got things unpacked, critters restored to their normal homes, had some tea and tried to calm down (me mainly), and make a new list of things we actually should have taken with us when we evacuated, we saw a freaking jet plane!! There is literally NO place around here to land a jet plane. That was just other-worldly. So we went outside to look at it. It was flying low and making huge circles, and then it sort of disappeared. And another smaller two prop plane was doing the same thing.
This time I managed to get a movie.
Turn the sound up loud so you can sort of get a feel for what this was like. They were only a couple hundred feet above our house. This went on all afternoon. The jet had to return somewhere to get reloaded with retardant, as did the smaller plane which was dumping water, way more water at a time than the helicopter with his tea cup. The helicopter just went back and forth to the river.
What they were trying to do is keep the fire from crossing the border and getting into Canada. There are a lot of houses up there, way more than on this side of the border. And it worked.
There was one really bright spot in being home again.
We had to leave it in the fridge when we evacuated, and we were not sure what would happen to it, considering we had no electricity when we left. Fortunately the crews on the highway that we had seen earlier in the day had restored the power lines. So whipped cream was feasible after all.
The next few weeks we were not able to leave the house.There was still a Level 3 evacuation order, and we watched the crews with their many trucks, pulling trailers with heavy equipment, driving past our house in the morning, and then heading back down again when darkness fell. Day after day after day. It was a long few weeks.
The winds died down completely and never got back to high winds, and the fire crews were able to get things under control. And even more fortunately the winds didn’t turn around and bring the fire down the hill back towards us. Once it snowed in mid November, that put the fire out finally.
October
After waiting for the roadblock at the bottom of our road to finally be moved so that a concrete truck could drive up, our contractors showed up in the middle of the month and built a sidewalk.
Have to love the yellow tape. It was like living in a crime scene for a few days.
Another thing that happened with the power failure back on the Day, it fried the electronics in our gas range. This was a whole other problem to deal with. We had to order a new range, convert it to propane and then only to discover that the oven was non-functional so we had to order another range. We decided not to fool around with a gas range, and that electric would do this time.
It is so nice to be fully functional again. October was really sort of a blur and there aren’t many pictures taken. We were mostly just trying to deal with wondering if we would need to evacuate again, wondering if we should move which we really didn’t want to do as we actually love this house and we’ve spent so much time and energy and money in fixing it up, but if we did want to move where would it be. Very stressful all the way around, and for weeks.
November
Time to play with things I’d frozen during the summer.
We didn’t get much of a harvest from a lot of our berry plants, the strawberries being the exception. So this pie has strawberries, raspberries, black raspberries, red currants, black currants, and gooseberries. It was delicious!
Our first snowfall was on the 16th of November.
A lot of the snow that fell on the 16th had already melted away. And then it all went away. We’ve had a few little snow falls since then but then it warms up and all melts again. We got some last night but it won’t be there for long. This has been a weird winter so far. Nothing much else happened in November. We didn’t do anything except try to catch our breath from the last couple of months and worked on doing more exercises mostly.
December
Finally the contractors showed up again on the 11th. Yay!
We have a shelving unit to put together for the garage and then we can completely move stuff from the storage shed and get things organized. This feels like a major accomplishment to get to this point. The was the last of our projects that required contractors.
All we have left is our bedroom to repaint and the closet doors to replace. We will do that ourselves.
The rest of December will be devoted to those two little projects. We should start the new year off with nothing to do on the house. We will be able to concentrate on the garden. The weeds better watch out. We are going to be coming for them.
Happy New Year (almost) and Happy Winter Solstice!!! A most important thing as the days start getting longer.