Today I’m thankful that we lived through the fires. Often when there are forest fires, people die. This time four people died locally, three of them related to the forest fire activity in town.

Probably in a bigger town we wouldn’t notice so much, but here people don’t die very often. If they do, their memorial notices end up taped to the post office door.

It started on Saturday when a local resident failed to negotiate a curve two miles east of here, and ended up dying in a roll-over accident. Her three passengers all survived. She was in her 70’s or 80’s.

Next there was a helicopter crash Monday morning. Really weird, in that this is the second year in a row we’ve had a fatal helicopter crash locally during a fire. Last year two fire fighters went down about ten miles southwest of here, right in the Klamath River near Independence Bridge. This year a single pilot died in a crash about twelve miles south near Norcross Campground, the northern gateway to the Marble Mountains. He was 61.

Stranger still, on Monday afternoon two out-of-town men employed locally as fire-camp cooks drowned in the Klamath River near a swimming hole I’ve been to dozens of times. Apparently they didn’t realize that we who live here swim in the creeks, not in the river - and especially not at the confluence of a creek with a river. A current pulled one of the men under, and another went in after him. Big mistake for both of them. They were both in their 30’s.

What a terrible loss of human life. My sympathies are with all the family members dealing with these tragic deaths.

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Recently at MySpace a site change made it possible for me to put another one-liner at the top of the page. My page now says, “Linda is quite happy to be alive.” That just about sums it up for me. I use MySpace to keep in touch with my children, and to promote some of my online activities, including this blog.

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I wasn’t feeling up to writing an article in Happy Camp News about the deaths that transpired, so I asked the woman I’m trying to sell the site to, to write it. She did an upstanding job of it: Tragedy In Happy Camp. I love her writing style.

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Yesterday Bob and I went shopping in Southern Oregon. We had a great day. I bought some healing jewelry, a tie-dye t-shirt, and some exercise equipment. We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Grant’s Pass.