Coffee Share 191102

This is a Weekly Coffee Share Essay. I’m part of a small group of bloggers who stay in touch and chat about blogging, writing, travel, photography, children, pets, work, life hacks or just about anything else that might be of interest.  Here’s mine for the week of .

Link to This week’s full list

Link to my Story Blog. Come share a laugh with me.

Good day all,

What a past few weeks it has been.  The Kincade fire to the north of us was plenty destructive and scary.  Today it is mostly contained and will soon be fully out unless something very surprising happens.

There was lots of property damage near Gyserville and Windsor along with what is likely the biggest evacuation of Sonoma County in history.  Thankfully, no lives, no residents, no fire workers, no fire firefighters – were lost and only a scattered few were injured.

At our home, we lost power last Saturday evening when the power company shut off power to prevent high winds from shaking live wires loose allowing sparks to start more fires.  The winds kept up for several days and we did not get our power back until Thursday afternoon.

We hosted 3 evacuees at our home, dark and cold not withstanding and loved their company.  Even if the air inside our home was cool – all our hearts were laughing and warm.  Our gas stove worked if lit by the bar-b-que starter so there was lots of hot tea and coffee by the light of our multiple camping lanterns.

One of our evacuees was our son’s girl-friend (who our daughter likes to jest how we like her better than we do her brother) was among the refugees.  Being new to our County she didn’t have family nearby and celebrated her birthday with us, in the dark.  So my wife opened a big bag of glow sticks and in moments we were laughing and having a great time.  As long as we didn’t step outside, we could barely smell the smoke.

Today, as we begin our coffee share visit, the sky is almost cloud-less and blue.  Most of the smoke as moved inland somewhere else, and my wife and I are planning our first trip ever to replace refrigerator food lost to the multiple days of being without electricity.  Compared to what this fire event did to even the few impacted, we are thankful that our only challenge is going out to buy food.

The fire did crater my ability to work last week and I was glad I have plenty of vacation time to take.  My boss likely wouldn’t care if I took the time off by other means, but if I had to I could have driven about 2 hours to a company office where I could have worked as normal, but that could have cut me off from being close enough to help my family and friends with the situation at home and I chose to work some from a city shelter so I could be minutes away instead of hours.

Writing was nearly a full bust too.  I could have written for a while to MS Word docs, but could only access WordPress via wifi, and the laptop would run for several hours on battery, but I would have to go back to the shelter when the battery needed recharging, so – not much in the way of writing.

Today, I progressed my blog backups and did one cleanup of a classic item in my collection.  It is one of my personal favorites and needed some simple editing, so if you’ve not checked out my, Rock Quarry Adventure, you might enjoy a 10 minute visit to my home town of Petaluma circa 1965.

Today, I’m looking forward to a normal Saturday of enjoying your coffee shares and playing with the blog.  I’d like to progress the search for a better theme and building a better looking layout for the collection, but I also want to explore other ways to share my collection (advice would be welcome).

As I was starting this essay, I noted that my 2019 view-count passed my 2018 number which was the last metric goal I was hoping to pass and I still have almost 2 full months to create and share stories.

All around, it’s been a strange, but good week despite what the fires could have done to us.  This weekend is something on an early thanksgiving time for me. Later today, I should at least start clearing our wind-blown front yard.  It will remind me of how fortunate we are to still have a home and yard.

I’ll see you soon over at your coffee share venue.

Cheers & Blessings

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