Plumage

Plumage

About noon today, I pulled up my AZ satellite image of choice, to see if any thunderstorms might be edging into the state for some landscaping water excitement at some point. And right away I see this immense plume of smoke lurching overthe White Mountains. My cubicle neighbor, Rich, says, "Yeah, that's near Showlow; it's supposed to be around 600 acres." The NOAA webpage agreed with him. Pfft. That was no 600 acres. The cloud was HUGE. So I started downloading the satellite images every 15 minutes and put together an animated GIF for posterity. I drove out for lunch around 1:00, and from here, 100 miles away, I could see this rolling wall of gray on the horizon, and right where the fire was hottest, it was shooting tall gouts of cumulus clouds up into the sky (they look like little white dots on the animation). We finally got an update on the radio a few minutes ago. They say it grew from 600 acres yesterday evening to over 19,000 this afternoon. Pinedale and some surrounding towns are being evacuated. Apparently they've seen enough to know already that it's arson. This thing will probably end up rivaling that 120,000 acre Colorado fire that forest worker set off. Rob thinks they should reinstitute hanging just especially for the intentional wildfire culprits. Heck, why hang'em or stick them in prison for decades when you could put them on a chain gang rebalancing the soil Ph and cultivating and replanting trees for the rest of their lives. Blah.

What did I have for lunch, you say? Went down to Soup'r Salad. I've been working on getting more vegetables into my diet. Subway is a pretty wimpy crutch. You get to a certain point in your life when you begin to worry about developing a rectal prolapse. Nasty stuff. Something I'd never have worried about if I didn't work where I work. Ugh. The video guys got hold of a huge book about musculature and surgical techniques, and they're all sorts of proud about it. Every time I go back there, they're like "Jeremy! Have you seen this?" and start showing me the pictures of people who's arms were hacked off by combines and windmills and stuff (Windmills of all things!), and then how the doctors disposed of the cube-sized arm bits, and then sewed up a flap over Hubert's new arm stump. Argh. And as I sit there turning green, Steve and Jody start going into their stories about setting up cadavers for surgeon training, and then the great fun of taking pre & post-operative pictures of some humongous lady and her rectal prolapse. Urf. There are far too many things that can go wrong with the human body.

Well that about does it for now.

Jeremy