pacheco fire

This is not the view that one wants to see from one's driveway (apart from the serendipitous crow - if one were deliberately looking to put a different scale, a different type of motion in one's image one would have had to wait a long time for just the right bird to fly into view).   It's the Pacheco fire, which broke out this afternoon about six miles north of Tesuque (and hence about fifteen miles north of Santa Fe), and the flames are heading off into the wilderness rather than towards town - which is bad for the wilderness, the watershed, and so on, but not instantly had for humans - and we'll see what happens with the winds.   I saw the smoke billowing up when I was driving north from Albuquerque - for a while it looked to be near to Nambe, and then once I was up La Bajarda I could see that it was closer to the ski basin.   Having now flown over the Arizona fires three times in as many weeks, I've had enough of this heat and low humidity (especially since the power outages have blown out our new a/c system, but that's another story), and so far as I'm concerned, the monsoon can't come soon enough.