Nearby fire

Yesterday afternoon, a house about a half mile to the east of our house burned spectacularly.  From our house we could hear sirens and explosions and see and smell smoke.  Bits of burnt cardboard landed in our yard and at one point I could see bits of paper tumbling in the sky like confetti.  We had to travel to town not long after this all started and we wound up driving within a half a block of  the house engulfed in flames - never seen a house burning that hard for real before.  Even three hours later the road was still blocked off.  We found out later that a woman died in the fire - an article describing this is posted on the Peoria Journal Star's website: http://www.pjstar.com/article/20150926/NEWS/150929462
I stopped by the house today, not surprisingly, there is not much left. While I was looking, a cousin of the woman who died stopped by and we talked a bit.  The woman who passed away was a widow who had lived much of her life close by to her house,  she had a child and grandchildren, and she loved doing crafts.  It is ironic that the bright red fire hydrant so very close to the house was useless because when the fire department tried to use it, a water main broke.  The news tonight says the woman apparently died of smoke inhalation.

PCS Homecoming 2015

Kristine and her friend Jared went to the PCS homecoming dinner tonight, and there were pictures in the gardens at Illinois Community College.  We took pictures of other family members, too.  Here are some of my favorites.  One very sad note:  the mother of one of Kristine's classmates passed away from cancer tonight.

"Fishing" Trip

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy for all of us, but today Katie and I made another foray into the woods in our neighborhood.  Our primary mission was to catch little minnows that I have been seeing in the streams to see how they will fare in our little fish tank.  Turns out they were pretty hard to catch!  We caught a couple of six-inch long fishes (released), a frog (released), a tiny minnow, and a tiny crayfish.  We made it to the little waterfall that I think is so neat.  We also found some sizeable plant fossils in the creek bed.  Note the carbonized log pieces extending from Katie's feet in the picture.

Lake Storey (Part 2)

On July 25, we traveled to the Galesburg area to a reservoir called Storey Lake to see a balloon festival - it got rained out, but we thought the lake was nice.  Today was the seventh day of highs reaching into the 90s (it will hopefully change tomorrow, the dry weather and the heat seems to be browning the cornstalks quite a bit) so we traveled back out to the lake to check out the beach there.  First we stopped at a new Happy Joe's Pizza in Galesburg.  The atmosphere is a bit more modern than the one we are used to than the one I grew up with in Green Bay, WI, but the pizza was still yummy and we stuffed ourselves.  Lake Storey was a bit green  and not the cleanest lake around but it was pleasantly cool.  The speakers were playing 80s music, and Karen and I enjoyed trying to figure out how things were likely different there now versus the 80s.  The differences seemed to be pretty subtle:  electronics, fashion, types of lawn chairs, etc.  There was a water slide near the lake, too. Galesburg's Stearman fly-in starts this weekend, so we got to see a number of biplanes flying around.