Earth, Wind and Fire in my Backyard

Earth
It’s been an interesting week in our neck of the woods. On Tuesday, while sitting in my fourth floor office building, it moved. Well at least it moved back and forth. It was my first experience with an earthquake. Ironically, the epicenter of the earthquake was in Mineral, Va. which is only a 10 minute drive from Bumpass, Va. where my parents own their lake house. I think the news reports would have been much more interesting had it occurred in BumpAss over Mineral.


Wind
We are expecting Hurricane Irene to make landfall in my town this Saturday. Our state commonwealth has already been declared to be in a state of emergency. We have been through a few hurricanes here before. Hurricane Isabel arrived in 2003 and spent our time doing this. A few years ago, we relieved stress caused by Hurricane Hanna by doing this. The easiest time for us was with Hurricane Bill (not so much).
After work, I plan on filling my car with gas, buying some water and beer. We have a generator so in the very likely event we lose power, our beer frozen things will remain cold. In 2003, we lost power for about five days. It took me up until the fifth day, last hour to stop flipping light switches when I moved from room to room. Some habits are hard to break.

Fire
After a ridiculously hot July, we’ve been experiencing quite pleasant temperatures this past week and to give our A/C and wallet a break, we’ve had the windows open. This morning I woke up to the smell of smoke in the house. The Great Dismal Swamp located about 20 miles south of my home has been on fire for several weeks. Despite their best efforts, firefighters have not been able to put out the fire and so far 5,500 acres have burned and continue to burn.

It’s unrelated news, Troy started real school yesterday. He was only there for a hour and parents were invited to stay.


One advantage of seeing a “daycare baby” make the transition to pre-Kindergarten is that they’re used to the drill of sitting still, paying attention and more or less following the classroom rules.



Today was his first full day and I snapped a few pictures before we left this morning. This clearly demonstrates his impatience with our photo shoot.


Let's hope we don't lose power for too long this weekend and all the trees stay where they're supposed to in the backyard.