September 6,-12 2020 Fort Collins, Colorado

 101 degrees with a hot. really, really dry wind. The wind is going a little more south today, we can see the north edge of the smoke plume. 

The smoke over taking the sun this afternoon.

Then the sun turned red and now it is gone. Some pendants I am working on. They have bicycles and cats in them. I was out of the ones I had.  These are not fired yet. Want to fill up my kiln before I run it. Esp when it is this hot. 

I tried to dye some pine needles yellow with turmeric with a recipe I got from the internet. They are kind of a dark yellow, like the old harvest gold appliances. The fire has grown from 34,000 acres on Sat to 96,000 acres Mon night. It was red flag fire weather this weekend. Almost 100 degrees, windy and low humidity. The smoke is bad. Here is the sky at 1030 this am. It was supposed to be in the high 90's today, but the sun could not get through the smoke and it only got up into the 60's. A snow storm is supposed to come in tonight and tomorrow, so should slow the fire down.

Ash and little black cinders are falling from the sky. Here they are on my car and the trash can. This is another photo of the sky at 1130 am. 

The sunflowers and silver lace are blooming on the fence in the alley. I don't think the sunflowers will make it through the storm, but who knows. The garden is covered. It is going into the low 30's, high 20's the next couple of nights. Snow this morning. Maybe a 1/2 an inch. Did not stick to the streets. I think the high was 35 degrees.

Covered garden at noon today. The sunflowers still look ok. Snow in a spruce.

The snow is up to Georges nose, about 1/2 inch at noon. Great day to stay inside and simmer red sauce all day.

The snow started again tonight. They are saying 3-6 more inches. The predicted low tonight is 30 degrees. In the morning when  I got up there was 2 inches of snow. It did not stick to the streets. I don't think it got any colder than 31, and that was 8 am today. So far the plants may survive. 

Snow on my favorite pine tree in the park, it has probably the longest pine needles in town, 9 inches, berries in the hedge and my poor sunflowers. I decided to finish up the rest of the crushed wine bottle that I had so I cast them into fritters. 

After a week of smokey skies, a couple cloudy cold snowy days, Thursday was in the 50's, but cloudy most of the day. This is a picture of a moment of sun that came out on my bike ride. I am working on cleaning up this lamp. John thinks it came with his 100 year old house.  He used it for years, but then  he noticed the wall next to it was scorched. So he wanted to rewire it. That was before he met me. So it has been sitting in the corner for over 14 years. He rewired it this week and it started out looking like the corrosion on the bottom right photo. I put a paste of flour/salt/vinegar on it and it came out looking like this. 

This is the flour/salt/vinegar past on the left. It took off the bad corrosion. I started polishing it with brasso and like magic it started to look the the brass that it is. I am still working on it. The white glass shade goes in the collar on top and the other white shade that I got at the thrift shop will go on top.