What a strange day it was. This afternoon at lunch I talked to one of my favorite history teachers at the high school. She told me that another favorite teacher of mine's cancer has returned. This time it is liver cancer; a few years ago he was treated for colon cancer. Allegedly the cancer was caught early and doctors are predicting success, but he is retiring after the end of this school year. I hadn't seen him in a while and only today was told he's on sick leave for a month while he goes through chemotherapy.
I had both of them as references for a full-time teaching job at the school.
That news bummbed me out the rest of the day and other news just piled on top of it. After my online biology exam I checked my Facebook page to see several of my Texas friends talking about their wildfires, from raging fires around Fort Davis, Forth Worth, Austin, Houston. Mark even said he may evacuate his east Texas home since he lives in the pigmy pine forest.
A check on a "Texas wild fires" revealed several fires over 100,000 acres with low containment in some of the prettiest parts of the state. Homes are in danger and so is livestock. I don't ever remember the fires in Texas being this bad.
And one of my more local contacts mentioned a road closure off Highway 83, which I learned later was a fire burning in the Ciernegas grasslands northeast of Sonoita which has burned 600 acres and is not contained. I could see that fire's smoke as I turned east on Hereford Road and looked back to my Northwest as the setting sun cast a brownish-red hue over the horizon.
When I got home at 6:40pm Kevin was already asleep so I had no one to talk to. Sometimes he wakes up and we chat a bit, but tonight he was snoring and when he is snoring he is best kept asleep. I did my usuaL: I got something to eat and got online to read the latest news, only to discover that my favorite fast-food restaurant in Tucson, Chuy's, was found falsifying tax returns and knowingly hiring illegals (and paying them off the books), after a tip from its Lake Havasu location. Kevin and I ate at that place a few years ago and the waiter told us then that she didn't know how to write a special request for the cook in Spanish so I ended up not ordering it. That Chuy's hires illegals isn't that much of a surprise. Everytime I've gone to one to eat there the waiters are all perky white college kids, but the hard-working cooks are Spanish-speaking Mexicans who one can see laboring through the open kitchen. All restaurants in town except for the independently-owned one off Kolb Road are closed until the investigation is complete.
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