Fire at Paleface Park

Update as of 10:25 a.m. Monday 9/5:

YNN is the best news source I've found so far:
http://austin.ynn.com/
You can also "like" "YNN Austin" on Facebook. Great, steady updates last night.

We didn't get evacuated, but it was a scary night. There's still smoke from the Pedernales 1 fire, as they're calling it, visible from our porch, but much less so than yesterday, as seen below. We had the cats, dogs & valuables packed in the truck & car, ready to go. Hugh & I spent our time hacking down limbs that were touching the house. I finally went to sleep at 3.

My original Sunday post:

Looking due north from our front porch

Paleface is 5 or 6 miles away as the crow flies, though it's about 18 miles by road. Hugh is reading tweets from a guy near the scene who says that though the fire is on the other side of the Pedernales, the river is so low that it's not a barrier to the fire. Winds are HIGH today, and blowing from the north (right toward us, that is). The sky is full of smoke and is alternately weirdly glowing and darker than it should be.

We are irrigating, and we also cleared a bunch of dead plants from the back area earlier, something I've been meaning to do for weeks. Feels good to have it done. Maybe I'll go out front now and sweep up all the dead needles that have fallen from the poor dehydrated giant pine tree that's by our patio. There is so much to do all the time; it's hard to keep up with everything, and we don't! Even if I had no job and did nothing but work outside here all day, every day, I'd never get it all done.


To the west (and up)


Shot from the back of the drive, behind the house; you can see our roof among the foliage on the left












I also dislocated my left big toe earlier and I'm having asthma from the smoke.
What a creepy and effed-up day.