Labor Day

Hi Cindy!

Is your DS excited and nervous about starting First Grade? Good luck to him, I'm sure he'll do fine ;)

I was reminded yesterday of exactly how thankful I am that I no longer work at the Mine Inspector's Office. If I were still there, or if DH had gone back, one or both of us would have been on the road to Kingman yesterday.

On Saturday two girls were off-roading with their father in the mountains north of there and east of Chloride. The hills are filled with very dangerous abandoned mines. We inventoried that area between 1995 and 1997. In the dozen or so sections that we traversed we assessed well over 500 abandoned mines. Some were fairly shallow but several that were scary deep. Unfortunately these two girls drove into one of them and fell 125 feet. The older girl was killed but the younger girl was found Sunday morning in the bottom of the shaft. She was airlifted to Las Vegas where she's in critical shape.

As far as I know, and according to MSHA, this is the first abandoned mine fatality in Arizona this year. It is not the first one nationally though. There have been at least 24 other people die this year. Most are drownings in old quarries but there have been numerous falls into shafts. In the last 8 years more people have actually died in your fair state than have died here in abandoned mines. The worst state though is probably Pennsylvania. They have two or three deaths every year.

With the long weekend we did get some of the house pulled back together. Here is a start on the front room. We got the books back on the book shelf after this picture (you can see the edge of it in the mirror, right next to the lamp. As you can see the carpet goes pretty well with the new paint. It is starting to look like a real room. Just got to find a new home for the piano.

I'll finish this off with a silly picture of Margaret. We went to Ikea this morning and got a set of small table lamps. We then tossed the set of cat balls into it and she had a blast playing with them and trying to crawl into the box. She barely fit. Teddy also had to check out the box but he didn't fit at all.

We finally stayed below 110 today, it was 109. Hopefully that's the end of it.

More soon, Take care, A