A Quick Post About My Day

Today is a personal post, something I rarely do outside of extreme circumstances.

I live in an area near Prescott in Northern Arizona. Currently there is a large brush fire, the Goodwin fire, that is burning to the south and east of my town. It started last Saturday and is now up to 20,644 acres burned with 1% controlled.

This was the view from my street yesterday when the fire was 4,400 acres and 12 miles away.

This is what it looks like now in my area. The smoke is so heavy and down to the ground it looks like fog or a dust storm and there is ash falling from the sky. Visibility is about 2 miles and there should be Bradshaw Mountain in the background but it is engulfed entirely with smoke.

My son’s school is being used as the evacuation site for areas that have already been evacuated. There are observation planes and helicopters flying over the house so low it rattles the walls and there are large flying tankers and Chinook helicopters towing water tanks going by regularly. Luckily there have not been any loss of life.

This is a spotter plane flying over my house, he was about 500 feet up and you can see the smoke even makes this picture blurry.

This is a Chinook yesterday flying from a nearby lake towing a water tank towards Bradshaw Mountain.

At this point my town has not been issued the pre-evacuation warning but I have begun getting things ready in case we do have to leave. I hit Walmart this morning to stock up on supplies and they are stacked in my garage ready to toss in to my Tahoe at a moment’s notice.

I am now experiencing a real life “What would you do with your collection if you had to leave unexpectedly?”

Now that I am comfortable that I have the important things ready to go I have begun to pull parts of my collection aside. This is most of what I would be taking; my entire Griffey collection along with my Buhner, Largent and Bader collections. My binders, which include relics, autographs, limited cards and sketch cards. My Griffey memorabilia and all of my displayed cards can be tossed in to the document boxes if it gets to the point I need to leave.