Yesterday we had a frightening incident near our property. A
cypress tree that had grown too tall hit an uninsulated wire on a power line
and caught on fire. There was a loud noise as the tree ignited, and within
seconds flames were leaping way up in the air from the whole top of the tree. I
should have taken a photo, but was too busy calling the power company and 911. However,
the flames coming off the trees in this photo of a forest fire in Yellowstone
Park are a pretty good approximation of how it looked. Fortunately the dry
season is just at its beginning, so the tree must have still had enough water
content to extinguish the fire by itself, so we could cancel the call to the
fire department. The local electric company came and turned off the power to
those wires, putting everybody on some other circuit. They will send a crew
sometime soon to do whatever they need to do to keep the trees from burning
again. This must be a fairly common occurrence because when I phoned them, the
first item on their robo-message was “if you have a tree burning, press 1”. Why
don’t they just insulate the wires?
That was the weekend’s big excitement. The Monday giveaway
is much more mundane. In the course of
doing business with various supply companies I acquire a lot of offbeat
samples, often unsolicited. I have a big collection of everything from
essential oil mixes to synthetic fragrance oils to Indian perfumes and attars.
This week’s prize will be a big selection of these commercial samples.
Winners of last weeks giveaway will be announced tomorrow.
[Forest fire photo from Wikimedia; power lines painting by Henri Rousseau, 1898]
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