Author: Joe

Waldo Canyon Fire

Last Saturday a fire started near Colorado Springs. I first heard about it on the airplane back from vacation on Sunday night, but all day Monday it didn’t seem all that close:

The picture (like most of the following ones) was taken through the window at work, so you can see reflection of the metal ring around my phones camera as well as possibly some blurry shapes reflected.

There were C130s out dropping slurry starting on Monday, but we only saw them flying around since we didn’t have a direct view of anything relevant at that point. Tuesday morning I actually got to see the ends of a slurry drop on the far side of the ridge that’s in the first picture, but I wasn’t quick enough and my phone camera doesn’t have the zoom to have made it visible in a picture anyways.

Tuesday afternoon the wind picked up to gusts of 65 MPH blowing towards Colorado Springs. A few people were listening to the radio scanner online and someone announced that they’d seen fire on the ridge. In the short time it took for us to get to the window to look we could already see huge flames well down the slope. This picture was taken a just few minutes later (from outside this time):

Everything was quickly obscured by smoke since the wind was blowing it toward us, but about ten minutes later flames broke out in sight farther north:

The picture didn’t really turn out, but there were flames visible from where we were at the bottom of the column of black smoke.

Just another couple minutes later I finally got a shot where the flames are visible in the picture (bottom left edge of the smoke – faint but you can see the glow of it without even looking at the full sized image):

Shortly after that our view was completely blocked by a low cloud of dense smoke. I took a picture but it really doesn’t do it justice. Basically the sky was significantly darkened and we completely lost sight of the ridge where the fire came over, but looking north it was clear and sunny.

Tuesday night listening to the scanner it was clear that the fire was actually down in neighborhoods burning houses, so I registered my phone/address with the local 911 system in case they started making evacuation calls for my area and packed some small stuff in my car.

By Wednesday morning the fire wasn’t really moving my direction, but it sounded like there were still structure fires going. For a while late afternoon the wind was mostly calm and all we could see was smoke:

Thursday and Friday the weather was good for fire fighting and they made a lot of progress containing it, but it’s still expected to burn for about another two weeks according to the last estimate I saw.

News sources:
News
Fire/evacuation map

Furmination

I started this post back in May but didn’t have my phone cable handy to add the pictures so I never posted it, then I got busy with other stuff and forgot about my blog entirely.

I borrowed a furminator from a friend at work to see if it would help thin out Dash’s undercoat so he wouldn’t be too hot and might not get as many knots in his fur. The answer is yes for thinning out, yes for not as many knots, and it seems like yes for not as hot:

He didn’t really want to be brushed at first, but after a few times where I followed him around the room with the brush he came and curled up in my lap so I could brush him. This was with the short-hair furminator I was borrowing, so it was doing great at loosening his undercoat but wasn’t getting it out, but alternating brush stroke and petting rolled it into nice balls of fluff. Brushing Talore just produced a bunch of loose hair drifting around so I didn’t take a picture, but I got a good bit off her too.

Several weeks later I got a furminator of my own (the long hair version), and even though Talore has short hair it works quite well on her:

Despite how much fur I’ve gotten out of her coat it doesn’t look or feel any different. The long hair furminator works much better on Dash with his longer hair too.

Plants, Pests, and Pets

The weather was nice over the weekend so I did a bit of work in my yard. Mainly I was pulling up plants that were growing in the gravel, but I did do some work on cleaning up the edges of one of the flower beds in an attempt to keep plants from escaping.

The plant that I spent the most time on was the lilac bush. I only know what it was because my neighbor was out taking care of her plants (as opposed to trying to weed them into submission like I am) while I was outside and she commented that this is the first year the lilac has bloomed:

Lilacs apparently only bloom on old growth and my bush isn’t all that old, so it’s been spreading out rather than blooming until now. Unfortunately the fact that it’s blooming now doesn’t mean it’s stopped spreading out. I pulled up a bunch of sprouts, including pulling up the root they sprouted from as close to the bush as I could, but even though I found several roots that hadn’t sprouted yet but were still growing outwards I’m sure I didn’t get them all. I need to catch my neighbor at some point and ask if she’d like me to remove the 4+ sprouts she’s got growing on her side of the fence. It looks like the fence is lined with paving stones buried vertically to block the lilac, but that’s apparently not enough.

Since it’s been nice outside (and warm enough inside that the cool breeze is appreciated) I’ve been opening the windows. Tonight I had a couple moths get in (there’s a tear in the window screen in the loft), and suddenly my desk became the most exciting place in the house as both my cats were running around frantically trying to jump from behind my monitors to catch the first one against the wall. I didn’t see if either cat actually hit it, but it landed on the windowsill within a minute and Talore caught and ate it. I might still have moth legs in the back of my desk from that.

When I saw the second moth fly in I turned off my desk lamp and turned on the lamp I use for reading on the other side of the room (because I really don’t need a cat to knock over a monitor or push anything off my desk). Unfortunately it kept landing on the ceiling above the lamp:

I ended up joining in the fun and helping by shooing it off the ceiling, and eventually Dash batted it out of the air. He was surprisingly gentle with it (just smeared dust off it’s wings on top of my book case, didn’t crush it). I guess he intended to play with it for a bit. Unfortunately he knocked it off the side of the book case and it fluttered through the loft railing. I didn’t see if it got away for good, but both cats ran downstairs and stayed there for a while. With how they lunged for it as it flew towards the railing I thought one of the cats was going to go through. Dash actually landed on top of Talore when he jumped off the bookcase, but neither cat paid any attention that that.

Dash has an appointment with the vet this week (yearly vaccines). I’ve had the cat carrier out for a while to make sure the cats were used to it, but until this weekend it was behind one side of my desk. This weekend I moved it to vacuum, but instead of just pushing it to one side I moved it across the room. Dash then spent a good portion of the rest of the weekend sleeping in it since he can see me at my computer desk from it where it is now:

Apparently as far as Dash is concerned it’s just a convenient box with the added bonus that I can’t really get him out of it except by holding it vertically with the door down and waiting till he steps out. Hopefully he’ll be that easy to get out at the vet, and I sure hope he’s as willing to go back into the crate after the vet visit since there’s no way he’s going to sit still and let me trim his claws beforehand.