Fires/Fireworks/Food, Smoke/Shopping, Travel/Tables

Love me some illiteration.

Have I mentioned the California fires yet? Oh, so, not in the last 24 hours? Over a 1,000 according to most counts. I feel so whiny complaining because we're not in any danger at the moment, knock on wood, but I just have to whine anyway and say...

I. AM. SO. TIRED. OF. THE. FRICKIN'. SMOKE.

And heat.

I feel sick and exhausted and headachy and lousy and I just want the smoke to be sucked up into space by some alien space ship with a huge vacuum hose. I know if there are aliens up there they have the technology. Please suck up our smoke and send us back nice clean blue sky summer skies air. It's the least you can do after, y'know, like experimenting on folks or spying on us or whatever.

Over 1,000 fires. I mean, I can't even wrap my brain around it. If said brain wasn't so confuddled by smoke that it could wrap anything. Right now if it tried it would end up looking like something a six year old boy would wrap, all crinkled, with no real corners, and held together with an entire dispenser of tape.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon staffing the football booster's fireworks stand. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. Why are we selling fireworks when the state is on fire? Most communities have cancelled their large firework shows (because of either a) the fire risk or b) lack of donations or city funds because of the economy) and ban personal fireworks. It's not that I think that fireworks are any more or less likely to set off fires this year than any other year. It's that we don't have the manpower to deal with any new fires. The firefighters and equipment are stretched so thin, they can't adequately battle they the fires they are now fighting. A lot of my friends have sons who work the fire lines and they haven't seen their kids since fire season began. I know that the fireworks sales is one of our two main fundraisers for the year but, c'mon people, use some common sense.

Today we went to Reno - again - hopefully this is the last trip I'll have to make out of town for awhile. But it was nice because Reno had a much thinner haze of smoke than we did, in fact by late afternoon most of the smoke had been pushed back over the mountains. Between the cleaner air and the air conditioned buildings, I felt better.

Hubby wanted to try a restaurant someone recommended that had outdoor dining. We sat in the shade at a very comfortable little bistro table with rocking chairs. Very relaxing. The food was great.

We finished off the meal sharing this lovely creme brulee.


Here's the view behind hubby.


And here's the view just to the right of my chair.

After our meal we went in search of a bistro set of our own for our back courtyard. After a lot of driving around, an hour stop to get a flat tire fixed (Les Shwab was very nicely located next door to a fabric shop so I just spend the time waiting in there!), and multiple store searches, we finally found one we both liked that was also in our budget and small enough to fit in the Subie. It's still in the car tonight, I'll take photos tomorrow for you.

We did some other shopping too. I'll post photos of that stuff over on Laume's Studio blog.

Gas in Susanville is running $4.64 or more at the pump. In Reno it was as low as $4.05 at Costco and $4.16 most everywhere else. We figured out that we'd saved almost $10 by waiting and filling up in Reno. The difference paid for almost half the cost of driving there. Crazy times.