After the fire

So it's been a while since I updated.

(I can't get over Lex's expression in this picture.)

I'm learning some new tricks in how to upload these pictures.
(Summer - one shoe on, one shoe off.)

Don't leave me, Summer.

My new favorite picture of Lexi!
One of her favorite places to play.
Posing together.

Lexi is growing fast.

Starting to grow out of her 3 month's clothes.

I love sleeping babies. For a number of reasons.....(mostly the sleeping part).

So innocent.

This is so typical of Summer.
What a sweet picture!
Giving a kiss.
So, here's an update on everything in our lives:

Me:

(Thought I'd start with myself, so I can get all my ranting out of the way so I can clear my mind to update everything else.)
In the category "Confirmed, I am an idiot", I have the following complaints:
1. Ahm...Mom brought me an upgraded cell phone when she came down when Lexi was born. It has been sitting on our kitchen counter. I didn't start using it because....that would involve taking out my sim card and moving it to the other phone = very hard! So instead, I kept using my old phone, which decided to slowly die (I'm not talking about the battery) while we were evacuated. Hmmm...it was ringing at volume level mouse, and I couldn't hear people talking unless I turned it onto speakerphone (at least that wasn't annoying - for them and me). At a time when using the internet involved going to the library (not going to happen with the littles) or breaking into a bachelor pad, it would have been nice to have a functioning phone!

In the category "Glad to be alive" and "First time Summer ever obeyed me" and "Continuing serious problem in our life":

Saturday, Scott did some yardwork here. (For the sake of us all, I will refrain from ranting about why he spent the day doing yardwork instead of working on the house, working on side projects, or other things with pressing deadlines. (Might have something to do with 80-year-old neighbor coming over/calling/son calling/chasing us down/etc. a little excessively.) So he pushed the baby jogger into the garage. Yesterday I went out to the garage to get something. (Maybe it was Gatorade to give to Summer to temporarily distract her from the fact that we were out of milk. So much for not giving sugar to toddlers.) Me - innocently walked over to Gatorade (right next to baby jogger), leaned down, heard very fast rustling noise, jumped out of surprise, then thought to myself - probably one of those little lizards, so I coolly looked to my right and was face-to-face with a snake. Okay....I'm 98% sure it was a snake. In my head I was convinced it was going to be a little lizard. Turned, looked, freaked out, yelled to Summer to get in the house (this is the part where she obeyed me for the first time in her life). I also ran into the house. There was another big fast rustling sound from the baby jogger as I was running away. One thing I know for sure is that I saw a head and it was big (for a reptile). So we either have a snake or a big lizard in the garage. Last night we carefully banged around on stuff and tried to scare it out. No success. The continuing problem is that the evil thing can hide anywhere in there, including many boxes full of stuff. I do not want to open one of those boxes when we move to our house and have a snake jump out.

Scott: (Moving on to more interesting topics.)
Has been working a lot.

I'm not sure what else to say about him.

Summer:
Has started saying words.

Yes, new words besides just "kitty".

She says "shoes" a lot, and one night, randomly, she was repeating about everything we were saying, but most of the time, she keeps her silence. It's kinda strange. She seems to understand most everything I say.

(Ah, look at me, turning into one of those artistic photographers.)

The greatest thing that she has been doing lately is that she's answering "yeaaaaaah" and shaking her head no sometimes. This is helpful. Almost like having a conversation.
Speaking of helpful, she also likes to help change diapers.

Or help Lexi answer the phone: "Here, it's for you."

Lexi:
Is dark.
To make a long story short, the other day a Hispanic woman asked to hold Lexi, so I let her, and then had this bizzarre moment looking at them together and realizing that Lexi's skin matched hers almost perfectly, and in general she looked a lot more like her baby than mine. Weird.

Lexi is such a good little baby.

Still sleeping a lot.

And is happy most of the time when she's awake.

Settles pretty easily - which is awesome.

Summer and Lexi seem to be opposites in personality.

I'm curious which one is more normal, or if they are both extreme.

Lexi = so mellow. Summer = so energetic.

House:
Roof is almost done. Only the trim pieces to put up.

Stone is almost done. Three sides done, only the front to finish.

(Note to Summer: most toddlers don't get to play like this.)

Panama Jack was here to work on the roof.

Yep, Summer, this is probably the last time you will ever play on the roof.

There were some questionable safety practices while they were working on the roof. Wish I could say no one got hurt. Guess I can say no one died. (Grant got a cut on his hand.)

Oh wait, not Panama Jack - that was Grant under that hat.

Grant came down to help. It was awesome - we tremendously appreciated it! I bought "Tin Roof Sundae" ice cream because they were installing a tin roof. (Not really tin, but anyway...) I thought I was so clever, but it was not a success. Tin roof sundae ice cream is vanilla with fudge swirl and peanuts. No one really liked it. (Maybe I shouldn't have bought the caramel pecan turtle chocolate swirl wonderfulness at the same time.)

Fire:

In the town of Bastrop, everyone still wants to talk about the fire.

In fact, according to a newspaper article that studied how things went after a major forest fire in California in 2003, they said it took about three years to rebuild after their fire. I wonder what that means because some things.....like the pine forest will not return in our lifetime.

(As one firefighter said...."We lost the Lost Pines (that's what the forest was called), but we gained the Black Forest.") Nice.

Well, if I had updated sooner, I would have said that we have been seeing smoke columns daily. One day I was coming home from running some errands, and I looked up and saw one of those helicopters with the water bucket. By the time I got home, I saw two helicopters circling, and one small plane. I didn't see the smoke that time. For a long time, there were helicopters/planes or whatever kinda circling all the time just looking for fires.

We did get some rain finally, and I think that tamed down our fire risk a little bit. Ironically, today was another really windy day, and I heard several people mention that we were kinda in danger of another fire on a day like this.

(Random picture of fire clean up.)

There was another pretty big fire one day. I was driving to town, looked up, and thought that cloud looks like smoke. I kept telling myself it wasn't smoke, it was just a cloud. Turned on the radio, and they were talking about the "new fire" in Bastrop. It burned 600, no, 1,000, oh wait, only 300 acres. No homes damaged. (At first they were reporting that the fire had burned up to 1,000 acres, but it was really only 300.) I think it scared a lot of people. Kinda fresh in everyone's mind, the last fire. This one, they brought in a pretty big plane right away, and they got it out fast, mostly from the air. (In these pictures, be sure to notice the police in my mirror. Yep, I didn't notice him until my photography session was over. After I was swerving around on the road, trying to get pictures, "Oh look, there's a police behind me.") Hilarious that I got his picture in my mirror. He did not pull me over. (Maybe he was distracted by the fire too.)

For all that was lost in the Bastrop fire, I can't help but think of all the ways we were spared too. Considering the fire was started by pine trees falling into powerlines (yes, there are already lawsuits), it could have started any time of day. I can't imagine the chaos and drama if we had been evacuated at night. Police banging on people's doors. Getting the girls out of their beds/waking them up. Traffic jam in the middle of the night.

Speaking of the evacuation, I thought that the police had not reached our street yet when we left since I never heard them, but Nancy (our 80-year-old neighbor, did I mention her already?) assured me that they had already driven down our street before we left. Her kids were the ones who told us we needed to evacuate. They had heard it from the police, who were driving down the street with a megaphone saying "Evacuate immediately." Which was significant because I guess, usually, they say something like "You have five minutes to evacuate" or some other time frame. So anyway, that's reassuring to know that we didn't hear them from inside the duplex. Nice.

Also, it occurred to me that some of my pictures of the fire may not have been very interesting because they were just pictures of a random smoke cloud. Slightly more relevant to me since I know "this one is approximately ten miles from the fire" etc. Sorry if they were boring. (These pictures here of the smoke cloud from the second fire are from approximately ten miles away or so.)


This picture is the view of the original fire from downtown Austin (approximately 30 miles away). Those people in Austin must have just looked out their windows and thought "What is going on out there?"
And this is a picture of the DC-10 that they brought in from California. They didn't actually use it here (so this picture is not from Bastrop) because there were too many firefighters and stuff in the area. They can't drop that stuff when anyone is down there. (Rightly so, that was my other comment on this thing, doesn't that fire retardant stuff look evil?) I mean, pretty soon, you start being more afraid of that than the actual fire. Or maybe not, but it does add to the drama.

So I'm in this mom's group in town. Of the twenty-some ladies in the group, four of them lost their homes. One of them is this girl, Brooke, who I've always really liked. Ironically, never knew that she lived about three blocks from us. They were evacuated Sunday night, same time as us. Her husband, Bowie (great name, huh?) is a state trooper (wouldn't it be cooler if he was a Texas Ranger?), so he was able to go back to their house on Monday morning. He got some of their important papers, took the pictures down off their walls, and their wedding album. At that time, the fire was entirely on the east side of Tahitian Drive - they are west of that. Sunday and Monday were very low humidity and very windy. The wind started to die down Monday night. Things were starting to look hopeful. Bowie was working that night when someone called him to tell him his house had caught fire. He watched it burn to the ground. Brooke said he called at 6:55 Tuesday morning and said "our house is gone." They have a little boy, Gage, who is about 1 month older than Summer and are expecting another in 2012.


This is their house.

Bowie and Brooke's house again.

I've never known Diana as well as Brooke, but she said they lost their house at 4:00 on Sunday. (That was the same time we were just getting evacuated.) She lived north of us. They evacuated when they were supposed to but she called a neighbor who was still on his way out to grab one more thing from their house for her. The neighbor said that he couldn't - the fire was already in their backyard.

The Weather:

Is starting to cool off.

If I had finished this post earlier, I would just say "is hot". Now life is getting more interesting - the mornings are cooler. Last week, temperatures were 15 degrees above average for this time of year. This week has been more average.
I believe we've had at least 90 days over 100 degrees this summer. The old record was 69 days. Smashed that one.

The Drought:

(Downtown Bastrop)

The last remaining dock at Lake Travis is now on dry ground. I just read how low the lake is, but I forgot already. Also read something to the effect of.....even if we have a normal year next year, it will not "heal the land". Lake Travis is a man-made lake - it's the water supply for Austin. They put a dam on the Colorado River and flooded some canyons so it is a very deep/narrow lake. Or.....it's usually very deep.

We have all kinds of watering restrictions. It's a complicated system...Level 1 means you can water your yard some certain number of days per week, Level 2 is blah, blah, blah. I believe we are on the most severe level. I'm not sure how these are enforced. A lot of people have actually been watering more because they are afraid of another fire and want to protect their homes. People are clearing out brush and all kinds of stuff like that too.

Anyway, I better wrap this up. (New goal, update more often, not so incredibly long. I must have a lot to say lately.)