Fire (and) Power

^^ my lame attempt at a clever title...

It was another long hot day here.  We have had record high temperatures for weeks now and not more than a slight sprinkling of rain in months.  The grass has all gone dormant and crispy and to make sure we have enough water to last out the drought we are under some mandatory water conservation orders.

So this evening as we were settling in, just as I was starting to prepare dinner, there was a loud *bang* and all of the power went off.  We could hear a neighbor outside say that a transformer had blown.

you can't see them here, but there were large flames

In fact, it had blown with enough sparks to start a fire in the dry, crispy grass just across the street from our neighborhood. There was a small crowd gathered out front, but no one had tried to put water or anything on the fire; they all just stood around staring and waiting... /sigh At least someone had already called the fire department by the time we got out to the street, though, and I could hear the sirens approaching.

We were already planning to head out for a bit later to my mother-in-laws just a few minutes away, so I grabbed all of the dinner ingredients and he grabbed a few other things and we headed out.

 

and the nice firefighters took care of everything

My husband found it interesting that they couldn't use the fire hydrant closest to the fire because at one point it was actually engulfed in flames.

Dinner and dishes and a few hours later and we decided to head back home to see if we had power or if we needed to make arrangements for the contents of the freezer.  Fortunately, we had power, and the apartment was already starting to cool back down.

 

nice view of the sunset from my mother-in-law's place: omg actual clouds!

When we got home I sent my husband over to take some pics of the damage.  You can see how the few parts of grass that were still green survived easily but the dry bits burned down to the bare earth.

 

There was even the carcass of what was perhaps an opossum (which we took a pic of but I decided I didn't think you'd want to see), but I don't think it got caught in the fire. More likely it was several week old roadkill that was just happened to be in the fire's way.

And with that the whole evening is gone. There are painting and sewing tales to tell but they will have to wait for Wednesday. If you absolutely *must* see something sewing or fashion related in the mean time, check out these crazy designs that popped into my blog feed today! (omg I'm weeks and weeks behind catching up on my favorite blogs! I swear I'll catch up soon, ladies, but the count is now over 100!)

Hope your week has started off well and with fewer flames!