Adam Schabtach's Blog
General blog stuff.
Yep, you read that correctly: Madeline likes to eat peas:
One might think that it’s butter that she actually likes, but these peas have no butter on them–no butter, no salt, they’re just frozen peas cooked in the microwave. She loves ’em. She’ll eat them frozen if given the opportunity.
Nice video here shot from someone’s helmet as they climb to the top of a 1768-foot-tall transmission tower. I’m not particularly fond of ladders; I don’t think you could pay me enough to get me to make that climb.
UPDATE: the video was taken down. See the comments.
The current statement from the Office of Emergency Management is that the fire is 87% contained, and may be fully contained by the end of the day. I think that this means that the residents of Boulder, particularly those on the west side of town, can collectively breath a sigh of relief.
The fire didn’t spread last night (much, anyway–if I’m following the figures correctly it grew either yesterday or last night, relative to its size reported on the day before yesterday) and no new evacuations were ordered. I woke up this morning and thought, “well, I don’t smell smoke, and the morning light doesn’t have that weird red-orange color that smoke gives it, and I don’t hear any unusual noises from outside, so I guess we’re okay,” and managed to doze for a bit longer. Hurrah for life’s simple pleasures.
It’s 11:00PM. The wind is blowing straight west with gusts over 60MPH through the fire area. It’s 70 degrees F and the relative humidity is 14%. They’re talking about evacuating the residential area west of Broadway, i.e. west of the major north/south street that runs parallel to the foothills where the fire is. If you draw a line straight west from the fire it passes north of Boulder proper and eventually hits our neighborhood. There is about eight miles between the fire and us. The aforementioned line crosses several big roads that should make very nice firebreaks, but much of that eight miles is open fields which are very dry this time of year. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how the wind could pick up a spark from the fire and drop it into one of those fields.
…we’re fine. The fire is up in the canyons to the west of Boulder, and we live a bit east of Boulder proper. It was smoky here all day yesterday, though, and ash fell on this area. I think that we must be more or less directly downwind from the fire because I noticed the smoke at about 10:30AM and the fire is said to have started at about 10:00AM.
It is scary, though. It’s a big fire and a lot have people have been displaced from their homes, some permanently. Even CNN has coverage.
Cuteness: we haz it.
I’ve just uploaded a bunch of photos of flowers to my flickr site here. I added them to a set I posted earlier so some of them you may have seen before. I’ll probably put up at least one more set of photos of the dahlias since they’ll probably keep blooming for several more weeks.
Incidentally, to give credit where credit’s due, Tracie took some of these photos.
Our kittens now have the run of the house. Generally speaking things are going quite smoothly, although they have displayed a fondness for chewing through small wires. This meant that I had to spend some time jacketing all of the wires on all of the wall warts in the office/studio with plastic tubing so that their teething activities wouldn’t sever the power cords of the wi-fi router, the Ethernet switches, etc.
All of the adult cats have accepted their presence gracefully. Zed and Alfred have been more or less indifferent about them since they spotted them; now Zed plays with them occasionally and Alfred grooms them when they’re within reach. (Alfred grooms anyone when they’re within reach.) Edwin felt compelled to hiss and slap them around a bit for a couple of days, but it didn’t take him long to realize that they were more entertaining than threatening. Shortly after that I think he realized that they have more energy than he does. Madeline seems to think that they still need the occasional whack on the head but maybe she’s just trying to take on the role of the responsible adult.
The kittens are starting to explore the house. It has become evident that they’re fond of chewing on smallish things, including wires, so I’ve spent a chunk of yesterday and today attempting to cover wires that they might find tempting or remove them altogether. Partway through this process I rebooted my main PC and was presented with this somewhat perplexing message:
Now, if the keyboard has failed, how is pressing… Never mind.