Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Getting ready for Fay

It was not until '04 that we endured our first FLA hurricane, but we had seen several wildfire seasons. The weekend we found this house, made the offer & had it accepted, fire burned stands of pine less than five miles from here.

Because of A's commitment to his old job & because one of the women we purchased the house from was taking the BAR in early August, we did not actually move in for three months; three months of wildfires burning all around the county. My first house was going to burn to the ground before I ever lived in it. Have I mentioned I am afraid of fire?

It is a simple choice for me. I will take three weeks of on/off power (more off than on) & four hurricanes happily rather than endure half that time of smoky air & "is the house on fire or worse, the barn" nightmares.

In '07 the county north of us caught fire. Fire blazed & the county seat was evacuated. Less than 50 miles away, our air was so smoke laden, I swabbed the eyes & nostrils of the horses every morning, scraped the scum off the top of the large water troughs & even so, the morning fog, laden with ash, made them all wheeze so deeply, I could hear them before I could see them, standing less than 15' away. Ashley (named because she was born during a previous wildfire) developed a cough that never quite went away. She remains our "canary in the coalmine" goat & a good predictor of pending pressure changes, wind changes, high pollen & all other threats to clear breathing.

Fay has been downgraded & will downgrade again, although most weather maps show her pivot from north bound to west bound with us on the west edge of the circle. Yesterday, I tipped, scrubbed & refilled all the livestock waterers, checked the bottled water in storage & started filling every small container with water to make ice, while we still have power. After '04 I know the most valuable thing, the heaviest to bring in, the most indispensable in a rainy wet storm is water. & after the storm has passed through, water will be harder to find than it would be during a wildfire.

& if we don't lose power & need all that ice, next week we can have mojitos.

1 comment:

  1. Do you have a good mojito recipe? I have been sadly disappointed by all I have tried after my divine (but $10) mojito at New Deal.

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