Post Evacuation Shakes

Good Morning from my Writing Lair! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I still don't have as much written as I'd like. Let's get started!

My Cheerilee story is about where it was a couple weeks ago. I found a perfect piece of cover art and got permission from the artist over a Twitter PM.

I'm not really big on social media, and it feels a little ridiculous at how many accounts you need to effectively communicate with a random person you want to contact. At the same time, a single system everyone must use has too much potential for abuse.

I'm doing better after the fires. The smoke was terrible, and we still don't know what all is smoke damaged. I don't even fully know what it means or what the implications are.

I only found out yesterday that the firefighters did not expect to save my town, but they did -- partly because they didn't have to worry about babysitting people who didn't wait until next door was on fire to evacuate. Even better, so far as I know, nobody is reported as dead yet.

When we got home, leaves and even a few branches were all over the front and back yard. There were even a few leaves from a species of tree that only features a neighborhood over. Inside, smoke permeated every room except the art room, and it usually is the worst smelling room in the house. Conclusion: doors slow smoke.

I arranged for pickup of four room filters plus a stack of furnace filters, and those really helped our indoor air quality. When we woke up, the air outside was good, so we just played a game of maxing air quality with outside whenever we thought of it.

One of the haunting images from two years ago was a row of smoldering foundations, each one spewing a jet of fire from its gas meter. After that, it's been procedure to turn off the neighborhood gas if it might feed a wildfire blazing it's way through.

With our gas out, we went to the church to pick up an electric space heater we own my mother sometimes uses at work. I tagged along, probably because there wasn't much else to do and I needed something to give me a sense of progress.

It was kind of eery visiting with all the aniverery decorations up. An old buggy was parked at the end of the hall. A timeline in the hall was arranged from right to left, throwing me for a little confusion. The sanctuary literally smelled like roses or whatever other flowers they had arranged in there. Our camera for streaming the service was missing, and so was a special pulpit we have. Both were evacuated by different parties.

Where our house smelled heavily of smoke, it wasn't a big problem here. In fact, no rooms but the tile-floored bathrooms had a even whiff of smoke, and even those were faint. Another round of carpet cleaning may be in order.

With smoke dominating about everything at home, I didn't feel comfortable setting up my main computer. I had this exponential growth game called Antimatter Dimensions, and that I can literally look at all day, and it's a bunch of almost nothing. It's really kind to the battery life, though.

Cleanup started with the air filters. One in each bedroom, plus a big one to shuffle around for where needed. Baking soda is apparently a good deodorizer for carpet, and it doesn't make things worse by adding extra smells like most --if not all-- professional cleaners do. Even our favorite deodorizing product, ozium, has seen our regular supplier branch out into the household perfume market. The problem I now have with baking soda is the gritty gritty on the feet. Double if it makes it in my sandals.

Life got a bit easier when we heard back from our insurance adjuster and made an appointment to have someone come by to inspect damages. Before that, it was a big mess of unease of not knowing when things would happen. Hopefully he will have fully accurate news for us, and hopefully we won't be checking into a hotel with an surprise checkout date.

Final question: have you ever had special cleanup after a major disaster?