Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The Station Fire burns on. This satellite photo gives you an idea of the size of it and the amount of smoke it's producing. There are no clouds in this photograph: everything you see is smoke. It has now scorched 164 square miles and the smoke is affecting Las Vegas and Denver. Estimated date of full containment: September 15. I don't think my eyeballs will stay in my head that long.

Not much to report in the way of personal activity, since going outside has become difficult. My eyes begin to burn and within five minutes it feels like my eyelids have turned to sandpaper on the inside. Then comes the sneezing and coughing, so I retreat into the house with the air conditioning. I don't even want to think of what the air filter looks like on the AC unit.

Some interesting stuff: Rick Jackoway, an editor I worked with at the Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder back in the early '90s, is a friend on Facebook. He sent me a link to this picture of "the gang," something we did every Christmas to print in the paper over the holidays as a sort of Christmas card to the community (I'm the devilishly handsome one standing to the left on the landing).

We also filled the paper with children's letters to Santa and readers' most memorable holiday moments and favorite holiday recipes and holiday pictures that preschoolers drew and anything else we could think of to take up space between the ads because the staff was on vacation and there was no one in the news room. We'd put the papers together before we left for the Christmas/New Year's week and hoped nothing major occurred in town until Jan. 2.

Well, the upshot of this is I've reconnected with a whole bunch of people in this photo whom I haven't seen or talked to in well over a decade. Seems all these folks were on Facebook all along and it only took something like someone posting a photo and wanting to know the names of everyone in it. The picture went from one person to another, and pretty soon we were all reconnected. It certainly is strange and wonderful here in the 21st century. Now if they would only get me that robot maid and flying car I was expecting...

My cousin Rick and his wife Candy are going to Paris in September and Candy wrote asking if we knew of any special bistros, etc., they should visit while they were there. I ended up sending her detailed information along with Web links to sites where they could purchase museum passes, boat cruises on the Seine, etc. It was lots of fun remembering the great time Steve and I had there on our trip a few years back. I told him we should go now (even though we had to put part of the trip on a credit card) because who knows when we'll be able to go again. And that was the last vacation we've taken (back in 2006). I think it was a wise choice.

Speaking of vacations, we're taking a tiny one up to visit mom over the Labor Day weekend. I wanted to spend some time with her since Kit died last month but, to be a bit more honest, I also just have to get away from all the smoke and heat and go somewhere for a day or two where the weather is pleasant, the air is clear and it doesn't feel so much like Armageddon.