Burning down the house

Last night you may have seen on the news (or closer friends may have lived through it!) that Boulder was in jeopardy of being damaged by some raging wildfires. There were two fires raging very near Boulder, both started apparently by downed power lines. Why would a few power lines have toppled over, you might ask?!?

Because of the frickin Colorado winds. Ugh.



I could see smoke from our office building yesterday in the hills north of our house and just north of Boulder proper. I didn't think too much of it except that after I picked up the kids from daycare and we were driving home I could see orange glowing and flames on the mountain. Delaney, the thrill seeker that she is, really wanted to see it closer. So I half-heartedly obliged her and we drove a little north on Broadway to check it out. At a certain point I started to get a bit scared as I gaped in horror at what looked like lava all over the mountains, seemingly only a few hundred yards away. Fire trucks zoomed past our car and traffic came to a standstill. I turned the car around and decided that Delaney and I had had enough thrill-seeking for one evening.

As I am prone to do in these situations, I turn on the TV in anticipation of news coverage and information. Some local channels were covering it but at primetime everyone cut away to their favorite shows. I guess the news would have to be pretty dire in order to cut away from CSI, right?

Delaney then proceeded to show signs of a bad illness, Garrett needed a bath and we needed dinner. So we forgot about it until the 9 o'clock news. When we tuned in at that point the winds had died down and even though 11,000 homes had been evacuated, no one was talking about fear of homes being destroyed. I thought of all our friends in Dakota Ridge and how we looked at houses in that neighborhood. We worried about our friend Matt's new brewery that was a hundred yards from the flames. The newscasters said that if winds continued or increased, and the direction changed, that the news might then change. Even though we were a good two miles away from the heart of the fire I stopped the television and had a talk with Kevin about our plan if we had to evacuate.

Kevin of course thought I was nuts. And he wasn't really engaging me in my need for the details of the plan, going from room-to-room to see what we would grab if time permitted. But I did it anyway. And I made him set out an outfit should we get the call. I grabbed the 4-5 jewelry items that were really important to me and a few documents and put them in one easy place. We talked about what we would do if we had to immediately get out (just kids and pets, in our PJ's), if we had 10 minutes and if we had 30 minutes.

It's pretty amazing to evaluate your house and belongings in that sense. I realized that I didn't care too much about anything in my closet. I could probably find better stuff at the store right now anyway.

The fire thankfully did not destroy any homes within city limits, although I think a bunch of houses up in the mountains suffered damage.

The fire did remind us of a few things, however.

That when push comes to shove, all we want with us is our family.
That we need to check up on our fire insurance coverage to make sure it's VERY good.
That we need a safe in our basement that is flood and fireproof.
That I want to take a bunch of my photo negatives in to one of those places where they convert them to digital. Then I will load them up onto Shutterfly.

I am feeling very lucky that everyone is safe and sound today. Of course Delaney is really sick with what looks like an ear infection, and we got almost no sleep last night, but I am still feeling very blessed today.