Day: 2020-09-16

More ducklings day 36 (start of week 6)

Today marks the start of the sixth week of these ducklings, which is when they are officially old enough to swim, plus no longer need heat (though they’ve been without that for the past week anyway). Still a couple of weeks before they are ready to go into the pond, though… not that that is an option while we’re evacuated, anyway.

So, now that they have the kiddie pool, I’m slowing increasing the water level. They can still touch the bottom, but in a day or two they’ll be actually swimming; that’ll be fun.

(Did you see today’s video with slow-mo and splashes?)

Pool time:

Pool time

Pool time

Also tray time:

Tray time

Fun splashes:

Splashes

Splashes

Splashes

Splashes

Splashes

Evacuation update: level 1

Today the fire officials announced that they have 3% containment of the “Riverside Incident” fire. Which may not sound like a lot, but means that they are confident that the fire won’t spread any closer to the threatened city of Estacada. With a fire currently covering 135,956 acres, 3% of the perimeter is quite a distance. See this map, which shows the containment line in black:

3% containment

They also notified us of further reductions in evacuation levels. We are now in the level 1 zone (again, I don’t publish our exact location for privacy reasons, but if you know where we live, you can see where the zones are relative to our homestead):

Evacuation and fire map

The smoke is still rather thick near home, in the 300 – 500 air quality range, compared to merely 150ish up at Mom’s place:

Air quality map

So we currently plan to hang around up here for another couple of days, and see how things improve. If the state of the fire and air are about the same or better by Friday, we might head home then; we’ll decide then.