Weird sort of week

We were surprised coming home on Thursday to see a haze of smog-looking air over Big Bear. Such things generally do not happen unless there is a fire. But the radio was giving no reports of such, & so we rather forgot it. But Friday AM the smoke smell was heavy in the air.

Turns out that this is "drift smoke" coming from the Santa Barbara fires 205 miles W/NW of us. Usually we are high enough that smog & other air issues from below don't reach us, but i guess there was a wind blowing the stuff up the mountain. Anyway, i've been keeping them in our prayers as i think of it.


I don't remember doing anything particular on Friday or Saturday. Usual stuff. Went to town.

Sunday we went to church & then to the Renaissance Faire, which is actually held in Fawnskin across the lake. These pics are not from this year. Duane forgot his camera. They are from when we went 2 years ago. But it looked much the same. It runs 2 weekends in August. It is small, & largely commercial, meaning that most of the booths are of things for folks to buy. But they do have several stages where different events go on.

Beyond the jousting we watched on where some ladies introduced five animals from the Moonridge Animal Park/Big Bear Zoo. They had a Barn Owl, a female kestrel, an opossom, an African Pigmy hedgehog, & a grey fox. It was interesting to learn that the hedgehog was bred only for pet sales, but that it is illegal in CA. So if Fish & Game confiscates animals, they are taken to this animal park if, for whatever reason, they cannot be turned to the wild. I didn't know that grey foxes can climb trees like cats, which is the reason red foxes were introduced into the US. Foxhunters got bored with trying to hunt foxes that could climb trees!

They did not have the parrot man this year. That was one of Duane's favorite shows when we went before.

They claim the jousting is "real" in that it is dangerous & they use real wood & not just something that is made to break when hit. It is true that what they were using was a lance of pine wood that certainly splintered when hit. And one of the knights was knocked off his horse in heavy armour & landed flat on his back, hard, & hit his head hard too. He had a concussion & was done for the day.

We stood in the shade & watched the joust, & it was at that point that i started to feel not very well. I hadn't felt all that well for a couple of days - things tasted "off" to me. But i felt not very well at all then. So we left not long after that. We stopped for lunch in town & i couldn't eat much (but i was very good; 100% gluten-free for 6 days now, i'm like an alcoholic, "6 days sober"!). By then time i got home i was feeling really awful, achey, & yucky. I had a fever just under 100F & oh, my body ached! But i took a lot of vitamin D & some quercetin & just rested.

By Monday AM the fever had passed, tho i still feel some tightness/heaviness in my chest. But i'm much better. It may have been something really short-lived, or it may be that vitamin D is truly a miracle. I'm still a little weak, but i've only one person scheduled this week & so will rest in the in-between time. And make an appt for acupuncture on Thursday.

Then, because i wanted a distraction we saw the movie "District 9." Whoever thought it could be compared to "Matrix" . . . well, let's just say i question their sanity. Duane defended it because the CGI was so incredible. And, "it does have a story." Yes, it did. Not one that i'd care to watch again, but it does have a story.

Coming down the hill today the sky was (as almost always) the deepest, amazing blue. I think i could stare for hours at the blue, blue sky & the green trees against it. God sure knew what he was doing when he created our world.

On a side note, i don't like to decorate with blue much. I wear blue, aqua, teal, periwinkle & those colors more often than not. I do like pure white with a cobalt blue for a kitchen or bath, but those aren't really available to me with the way we have our house set up. But i don't like house paint - interior or exterior - in blue. Ah well, we all have our way of looking at things.

As we came down the mountain the sky got paler & paler. Then at a certain point when we can see beyond the horizion of mountains & into the valley, we were looking at dark, dark haze. Most of it is smog i suppose, with a mixture of that drift smoke from the fires north of that area. It looked awful. And driving into it visibility was limited to about 2 miles. Yuck, yuck, yuck. So that was the circle of this week.

I'm quite behind on blog reading. When i was ill & recovering i didn't feel much like keeping up. Too much work to try to make my brain function. Not that anyone would really know that i was missing! I don't comment very often.

This is the hat we bought for Duane at the 2007 Faire. We also got a straw hat for me, but just an inexpensive thing, straw, made in China. I don't have a pic of it. They did have wonderful, handmade straw hats, but i just couldn't justify spending that amount of money on them. Not that i devalue what those ladies do, i know it is valuable. But 2007 we weren't doing all that great with money & i didn't want to spend $70 (or whatever it was) on a hat.









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