Stressing a Little

photo by Don Seegmiller (KSL.com)

I'm worried.

Have you seen anything about the wildfires in Utah on the news? Saratoga Springs was burning a few days ago, but I think it's out now. That's where my sister lives and I have Tupperware friends there. We felt the smoke and ash here where we are, but that's nothing compared to the fires burning in Sanpete County.

I've told you forever that I'm from small-town Utah and now I must confess that I am from Sanpete County. My sweetie is from a small place named Mt. Pleasant and my MIL still lives there as does my sweetie's sister and her family.

There is a fire burning there. A BIG one!

Today they evacuated the town of Fairview. It is only five miles north of Mt. Pleasant. We are supposed to go down there for the 4th, but maybe there will be nothing left to go to! Everything is so dry this year. We didn't get the snow in the winter and now we aren't getting any rain for the summer either. I'm afraid it's going to be a long, long dry season here. I borrowed a couple of pics from the story on KSL.com. (I hope they are OK with that.)

photo by Christian Probasco (KSL.com)

My MIL sent us this email today:

"They have now evacuated the west half of Fairview.  Cars and trailers are streaming into town.  Some trailers stay at our park.  The Red Cross has shelter set up at our High School.  There are quite a few cars there. 

There is another fire just over the east mountains from us.  the smoke can be seen just east of my window and  north quite a ways.  They evacuated the girls from Miller's Flat YW camp.  So far it is staying on the other side of the mountain.  If it comes over it'll get Whispering Pines and Pine Creek cabins  and the new TIFI Scout camp is up there."

 Yeah, I'm more than a little worried.

Did You Miss Me?

As you already know, we've been out of town all weekend. It was a necessary, bittersweet journey. Our hardwood floors were in desperate need of refinishing so that meant the kids needed to be out of the house for a few days. Memorial Day weekend seemed to be our only opportunity, so we grabbed it. My sweetie started sanding things down early in the week. That meant the house was pretty torn up all week. We had to have everything off the floors! That meant cleaning out the hall closet and the floor of the pantry. After a couple of days of sanding, masking, and sanding again, he was finally ready to pour. The first light coat went down on Thursday and we all slept in the basement with the doors closed.

All ready for church!

On Friday, I packed up the kids and left for Grandpa's house. My sweetie would join us on Saturday after he made the final pour. I'll spare you the details on that because he actually has a funny story to tell...

When we arrived at my dad's house, everything had been locked up tight for a while. The house smelled kind of funny and the kids were a little nervous about staying there. It was hard being in town with Grandma gone. This was our first Memorial Day when we would have to decorate her grave as well. We aired out the house and decided on a huge sleepover in the living room. The kids all spread out their sleeping bags and pillows. We ate hot dogs out of a cooler and played board games and read stories.

The sleeping on the floor thing was brutal and early in the morning I sent my sweetie a text asking him to please grab the air mattresses before he hit the road. We ate bowls of cereal and then headed off for the Memorial Day parade. We mostly enjoyed it except that the wind kicked up and blew sand and grit into our eyes and made things a little miserable. Scout was thrilled to catch a Frisbee that was thrown from one of the floats. It hit a girl in the head and while she was a bit disoriented, Scout snatched it from the ground. She probably should have surrendered it to the other girl, but she was so excited to be the winner, that I just didn't have the heart to make her do it. Besides, the other girl didn't seem all that upset about it.

After the parade we ate lunch and then joined the festival. Is it just me, or are festivals all about spending money? We were a little disappointed about that. But we all piled back into the van and I took the kids on a driving tour of my old high school and some of the other sights they hadn't seen.

My sweetie finally showed up around 7:00 and we ate dinner and ran to the local WalMart. My sweetie is all about Redbox, so we got a movie and headed back to the house to watch it. We made popcorn and just enjoyed being together.

The air mattress made the second night much easier although it still wasn't like my bed at home. We had committed ourselves to attending church. It didn't run as smoothly as I had hoped. I saw a few people I knew from years past...remember I've been married for nearly 29 years. I even saw a couple of girls I went to high school with. I guess we are all grandmas now.

We made the rounds of the cemeteries on Sunday afternoon. We stopped at six, but drove by several others. I love the family history stories we share on those outings. It gave me a few good topics to blog about. Then we joined up with my MIL for a sandwich and more stories.

One more night at my dad's place and then we were on the road this morning. I had all the kids in the van with me and my sweetie hung back to do a few home repairs for his mom. We got home around 3:30 and began the huge clean up task. The hardwood looked great! But there is still so much to do. We can't move the piano or the major furniture for at least another 24 hours, so everything is still a mess.

I hope you all had an awesome weekend and maybe you got a chance to visit a cemetery or two...or six...