Photos of the fire + Renewing my blogging vows

Internet access that was lost with the fire has finally been restored. I’ve spent an hour or so today checking email and reading your kind comments on my blog. Thank you for all your sweet congratulatory emails, phone calls, blog comments and texts when Marlee was born. I am sorry I haven’t gotten back with most of you yet. I will get there – hopefully soon. And thank you again for your comments and emails on my post about the fire. I’m friends {and family} with some of the sweetest people around.  Truly, I am.

I'm trying to recommit myself to writing more regularly on my blog again, hoping to get back to where I was before I got pregnant. I enjoy blogging. It's therapeutic, it’s my escape, it forces me to take more pictures, challenges me to write something interesting even if nothing interesting is happening, and I absolutely love looking back at what we were up to in days gone by.  When the fire blazed around our neighborhood I found so much comfort in the fact that I had written so many of our happenings down. And that it was all stored in a place that could not be touched by the flames of the fire. Pictures, stories, memories – all safe, no matter the state of our house.

One of the sweet 90+ year-old widows that goes to church with our family lost everything in the fire. Along with losing the place she called home since 1953 she also lost her clothes, her furniture, her food. But most heartbreaking of all is the memories and family memorabilia that the fire took away from her and her family. She lived in a time before the world was digital so none of her photos were backed up on external hard drives {are yours?} and she only had a single hand written copy of years of journals.

Everything burned.

She is not alone. I’ve noticed it to be an unvarying theme among the fire victims: They got out with the most important thing, family. Most the rest of the stuff is just that, stuff! But no matter the size of the insurance policy all the years and years of photos and journals and memorabilia cannot be replaced. Not ever.

Earlier this year Spencer backed up all our photos on Carbonite. And a few Christmas’ ago I scanned in all my parents photo albums so me and my siblings all have digital copies of our childhood photos. My goal for this year is to scan in all the rest of Spence and my photos: Spencer’s mission, our high school photos, wedding photos, our dating and newlywed years and the photo albums of miscellaneous photos that we took prior to getting digital cameras. I will also be making digital photo copies of any hand written journals/notes and turning my blog into a book {I haven’t done that yet}!

A few of the other things I will be doing: creating emergency preparedness bags, upping our food and water storage, making copies of all important documents and creating a list of things to grab in case of evacuation. Believe me, I don’t think straight when it really happens. I’m not going to remember to grab everything {or anything, in my case}. And quite honestly, time usually doesn’t allow for you to grab much.

Anyway, some photos of the fire.

Oh, but before I stop rambling I want to thank ya'll for supporting my writing habit. Really, thank you. This little blog and I have gone through a lot together. There have been times when I have gotten my feelings hurt and wonder why I journal in such a public forum, times when I've wished I had taken the time to write more, times when I have felt like stopping all together and times when I’ve leaned toward the other extreme and have debated increasing readership, possibly blogging “for real” {and I discovered that was so not for me, by the way}.  I finally came to a conclusion that I wanted my blog to stay consistent with what I intended it to be when I started, a family journal of sorts. A place where I can jot down my thoughts, store photos, and write about the things that we do.  So that is what this blog is.

Aside from my sisters and parents I’m not entirely certain who reads my blog. But if you read I want to thank you. Because honestly, it wouldn’t be near as fun without you.  And although I write for journaling purposes I wouldn’t have the drive and commitment to continue writing if it weren’t for my handful of readers that comment and keep me motivated.

Okay, I’m done rambling. Cheers to blogging. And double cheers for the firefighters that fought the fire. And one more cheer for NO MORE NAUSEA!! Oh happy day.

Most of the following photos come from our local newspaper:

This house is right before our neighborhood. Somehow it survived the flames!

I took this picture after we were evacuated as we sat and watched the smoke on my sisters front steps:

And these are photos that I took shortly after they lifted the evacuations and we were allowed to return home. They are taken of the area damaged right across the street from my neighborhood.