Fire Season

After taking Anna to her swim lesson this morning, I left the children with Mikel for the day so that I could continue our furniture shopping. It's to the point where Mikel has asked me to present him with a list of finalists of sofas/front room furniture and then from there we'll figure it out. It's too difficult for us to take the children into furniture stores when we're only "browsing" to see what jumps out at us. I've already hit all the furniture stores in Rapid City and am not blown away by anything, so I drove about 50 minutes or so to a little town called Spearfish. It's probably the next biggest town around here, though considerably smaller. But even so, I could only find one real furniture store there, along with one rustic-style (not my taste at all) furniture store.

On my way home I called Mikel and told him I thought I was witnessing a wildfire behind one of the hills, with huge plumes of smoke filling the air as I got closer to Rapid City. The fire was not burning, or at least not visible from the interstate, just an hour and a half or so before. Once I got back into the city I revisited a couple furniture stores then headed home. By this time, the fire had apparently swept through about 600 acres and neighborhoods were being evacuated. I guess I sort of lost my bearings, also, because I took this photo from our street just a few houses down. From my vantage point on the interstate, I wouldn't have expected the fire to be so visible from our home. I'm still learning the layout of the area.

Thankfully, a relatively short but very heavy rainfall moved in right around dinner time and put a serious dent in the fire. I'm not sure of the fire's status as of this moment. Mikel had to go in to work because of it. With our scorching temperatures and brittle ground, everyone continues to be on fire alert. (Just a couple weeks ago, a terrible wildfire further out from Rapid City took one man's life and burned dozens of homes to the ground.) Today we hit 106 F. Tomorrow we're expected to break a record and reach 107 F. Triple-digit temperatures are expected for the next five days. It's oppresively hot. While Anna and I were swimming this morning at the indoor pool, Mikel took Alexander out to our little kiddie pool for a short time. He said Shreve hung out with them for a bit and howled in pain as he was coming back inside the house because the back porch was too hot on his paws. Poor doggie.