Smell that smell

The smoke from the fire east of the river is finally drifting near enough to be smelled. They are evacuating the area south of the town limits on this side of the river, now. Updates on the situation are available at The Sacramento Bee and at California Department of Forestry.
Sooner or later, everybody knows this whole town is going up in flames. Keep watching.

Unburned...so far.

A great plume of smoke is rising from the forest almost directly across the Feather River from my neighborhood now. Oddly, the first thought which crosses my mind is that the spanish word for feather is pluma.

The fire seems to have moved quite a way north during the night. It was drifting south, yesterday. Or perhaps a new fire has started. So far, no tanker planes are flying over the house. I should probably expect them soon, though.

Sluggo, Sluggo, Sluggo

Computer crapped out on me again. Error message reading "The COMCTL.DLL file cannot start." For a while, it looked as though even "scanreg.exe /fix" wasn't going to bail me out this time. But it finally started working again. For how long? Probably not very.

Sluggo's ongoing dementia may be unimportant, however, if this place finally ends up a charred mass. I'm going to take a walk down to the canyon, to see if I can get a look at whatever is going on on the other side. The trees will probably block my view, though. As long as there are trees. And, if we have to evacuate, Sluggo will not be among the things I take with me. I'd much rather keep the cats.