Retired State of Mind : May Day!

The weather here is very hot and very dry, perfect fire conditions because we haven't had much rain here. For the third day in a row we are looking at high winds up to 40 mph which are also not good for fires. There is a fire way up north that they say is only 10% contained, but it didn't grow overnight, but anything can happen in these winds. I don't think anything could be worse than the fires we had in October 2007, they burned for 19 days and burned from the US-Mexico border all the way up to Santa Barbara county, they were absolutely devastating.

Even with the fire danger there, we are in much better shape than the people in the South and the Midwest with the massive tornados and flooding. My prayers go out to all of them.

We had a fire near a transformer station this morning that knocked out our power for about an hour or so. You don't realize how much you depend on electricity until you don't have it. Fortunately for us we have a generator so we could make coffee and keep our refrigerator going if needed. It was 71 degrees at 5:30 this morning so we knew it was going to be a scorcher, so I was planning on living in the camper today in case the power never came back on, that would have been kind of fun!

It is so windy that our pool is filled with all sorts of debris every day and today Hubby found this lizard clinging for dear life. He was lucky there was a leaf clump in the pool to hang on to or he would have definitely been a floater. He was so happy to be out of there. He actually turned to us, smiled and winked! OK, I am kidding about the smile, but I swear he winked (or maybe it was just the chlorine in his eyes that made him do that).

The hummingbirds are very active today despite the wind, poor things, they get blown all over the place when they are on approach to land at the feeders and then the feeders are blowing so they really need to compensate for the landing. This guy completely overshot the runway, corrected and then nailed it.