My Natural Disaster is better than Jeremy's

 Sorry Jeremy, you have back surgery, a doctor tells me I'm going to die, you have flooding in your park, we get a windstorm that knocks out power to the entire county for 2 solid days, eventually takes 2 weeks to get power back to everybody, does an estimated 15 million dollars in damages, and smashes houses and cars all over the county. 

 We put an small airplane up the day after the wind storm to look for people and/or cars trapped behind roads that looked like the one above, which was essentially every main road on the forest, and at 12:00 the observer called to tell me they finished flying the district and didn't see anybody.  Then at 12:30 a guy came crawling over the downed trees along a road and met one of our folks out surveying damage and said his car was trapped about 2 miles further up the road.  So the next day we ordered a helicopter and had them fly the district again, but lower and slower, which is where most of the pictures came from.  It was a pretty amazing storm, I've never seen the wind blow that hard in my life.  They were predicting 60 mph gusts that day, but it had to be blowing harder than that, we've had 60 mph gust on the district before that didn't do that level of damage.  I have a computer program for modeling the terrain's effect on wind, and I ran a 60 mph gust through it and it came up with 115-145 mph for it's top windspeed, which I find totally believable.

 After the wind storm clean up was pretty much done I took a couple days off and took the kids camping.  Breakfast on what was predicted to be the hottest day of the year.

 How Simon and Dylan stayed cool on the hottest day of the year.

 This was one of the funniest things I think I've seen the kids do, they were totally hamming it up trying to make me laugh harder, and it worked.

 The inside of the wall tent on the first night.  We brought the dogs with us.  We went to sleep at about 10 pm that night.  At 4:30 the next morning, I was woke up to the sound of dog barking like it was going to kill something, then heard the other one join in, then I saw a squirrel turn around and dart out of the wall tent, with the dogs in hot pursuit.  They left the tent, came back through the tent, slamming into the cot the boys were sleeping on and bouncing off the center tent pole, over the top of me, out of the tent, then back through it again, the whole time the dogs are barking, I'm yelling at the dogs, the squirrel is shrieking in squirrel terror language, and the kids are dead asleep.  I got up and went outside the tent to see Arlo catch the squirrel and give it a good death shake.  Dylan was the first one awake about 2 hours later, and I think he may have thought I was making the whole thing up, he didn't hear any of it, neither did Simon when he woke up a couple hours after that.  I can't believe what they'll sleep through. 

This picture was supposed to be up with the other ones.

Did anybody watch the meteor showers last weekend?  Simon and I stayed up til 2 am one night watching, it was awesome, we saw one meteor that I swear was going to hit the ground.  It just kept getting bigger and brighter and lasted about 3-4 seconds, which if you count it off in your head and picture a meteor getting bigger and brighter, is pretty cool.  They're apparently called fireballs, I read about them the next day.  The next night of the meteor shower neither kid wanted to stay up and watch it, so I stayed up until about 4 am watching them, with the help of a couple pots of coffee.  I decided that I would just sleep on the trampoline once the coffee wore off, since that's where I was watching from anyway.  I left Faith a note, she had to be at work at 7 that morning.  She left for work while the kids were still asleep, and when they woke up they didn't see my note, and grew rather concerned they were home alone.  So, rather than enjoy it, they went over the district office and told my boss their mom was at work and their dad was supposed to be watching them but he wasn't anywhere to be found.  Someone from work actually came over and looked around the house to make sure the kids didn't just miss me, then left me a note.  The kids decided they'd be OK at home as long as they locked all the doors and sat on the couch watching a movie.  The whole time this is going on, I'm sound asleep on the trampoline, which is in full view of the road every single person has to walk or drive up to get to the office.  I'm sleeping in a gray and bright orange sleeping, and I don't if any of you have noticed, but I'm kind of hard to miss, especially outfitted in bright colors.  I woke up and said good morning to somebody walking by, who looked startled by my apparently disembodied voice floating out of the bright orange mound on the trampoline and said "We've been looking everywhere for you!"  I tried to get in the house, and found all the doors locked, except the sliding glass door on the deck, and went in to find about 30 messages on both my personal and work phone.  It was pretty funny.  That's about it, my boss is on a fire, so it appears that I get to work for 19 days straight, which will be nice.  Hope everybody's doing well.