#Flagstafffire. Not a good meme.

The last couple days have been rather exciting around here, as we've watched two extremely impressive looking, dangerous fires burn thousands of acres of woodland just a few miles from our home.  Lots of our friends have been evacuated, but so far it sounds like everyone's okay.  We've offered... "You can stay with us."  But so far no one's taken us up on it... It's true: our house is kinda small... And it's also true: we live in the barrio.  And we understand: to some staying here might seem, somehow, a bit more dicey than facing a forest fire.  However, it's also a fact: our neighborhood, Sunnyside, Flagstaff's only home-grown barrio and its sole enclave of real, authentic cultural diversity (and the best restaurants), can also lay claim to having the city's lowest risk of fire... forest fires, anyway... hanging around here, in the 'hood, on the Fourth of July or on New Years Eve, well, that can be a little scary sometimes. 

Anyway, the last couple of days I've been taking a few pictures and following all-things-fire-related things pretty closely on Twitter using the hashtags #flagstafffire, #schultzfire, and #swafire For this kind of thing, keeping tabs on fast-breaking local information, I gotta tell ya: Twitter's pretty dang amazing.

The Hardy Fire started on Saturday morning, June 19, just over a mile south of our house.  It looked like this (see: below) for much of the day yesterday.  The tankers were flying low over our house most of the day.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Schultz Fire (below) started late this morning a few miles to the north of us, but behind Mount Elden.  The plume eventually rose some 8500' and was visible, per the Twitter-sphere, for more than 100 miles.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

All I can say is: It'll be nice when this is all over, and everyone's back in their houses safe-and-sound, to get back to more mundane Twittering... about this-and-that... or seemingly important personal epiphanies ("I love brownies!")... or whatever clever Internet meme or viral video's made me smile.  But for the time-being, my Twitter stream will most likely continue to be a lot of retweets (RT) of the fire information others have provided.