LABOR DAY
So of course, Ryan had the day off today. He's been itching to take us all on a hike, so off we went to the Boise foothills. Wow. There's nothing pretty about them, I tell ya. It's all brown and blah. But we did get to see fields of tumbleweed, ripe for the blowing. I even picked one and we watched it tumble away. And how cool is this--we found two plum trees with yummy ripe plums! (that's them in the hat Jared's holding.) They weren't exactly wild...they were planted next to a nature center building. But Ryan grabbed one and it was so good that he monkeyed up the tree to get all he could reach. I ate about three. Zach, always hungry, was game and ate about 9! Jared was chicken and wouldn't even taste one. But he did polish a bunch on his shirt, to get the periwinkle whatever-it-is that covered the skin off, to make them shiny deep purple. He did vow, however, to try a tiny taste after we'd taken them home to wash them and cut them up. Astonishingly, it turns out that he likes plums (just like he likes the ones we buy at the grocery store), and in the safety of his own home just said, "I could eat plums all day!" What a turkey!
Excited by the idea that you can find things to eat in the wilderness, Jared picked some dry grass heads and said, "who wants to try some wheat?"
After we found the plums, Ryan took off on a more strenuous hike while the boys and I walked the 1/2 mile back to the Jeep. Then we drove to a cool nearby park, where Ryan ended his hike. We didn't beat him by much!
We played at the packed playground for a long time, then dragged two tired boys to the Jeep against their will. We drove around Boise a bit, to see our old duplex and some the progress of some construction projects we'd been watching while we lived there. Like an old house we saw them put up on a truck and haul a few blocks away, and a church that appears to be cut in half! Zach didn't last too long, and passed out in his car seat.
Then I worked on Jared's cowboy quilt and Ryan worked on reformatting his computer.
Wow. We sure are exciting.

Oh, I almost forgot. On the way to the foothills, we drove past the scene of a horrible fire. It started as a brush fire last week, and the 50 mph winds blew it into a neighborhood. The first house caught on fire 2 minutes after the first person noticed the fire! 50 homes were evacuated, 10 houses totally destroyed, and others damaged. We've been looking into buying a home in that part of town, so we had driven around there very recently. It was weird to see the houses completely leveled. We've seen burned-out houses before, but not like this. They were gone. No walls left. Oddly, there are bookcases still standing, though.
They say the houses were instantly on fire. It wasn't like you noticed smoke and ran outside. People only got out because they heard something going on outside and went to see what was happening. One man went out to see what the ruckus was about, and when he turned around to call his wife out of the house, he saw his house completely engulfed. His wife was the only casualty of the fire.
It was a sobering sight to say the least.