Our unique and smokey evening

Well... Last night we had to evacuate our house. We had a small thunder and lightening storm and it caught someone's land on fire nearby. We saw it smoking for a while in the distance but it got way big and there was tons of wind. That's never good. We've got it on video tape, so that's good. It was quite a strange feeling needing to take into account what we should take with us. I thought we were going to have time to pack a few sets of clothing for everybody but that wasn't the case. I ended up grabbing an extra pair of undies for myself and a set of clothes for each of the kids, toiletries which were still kind of packed up already and I managed to remember shoes for everyone. We grabbed all our pictures and our important documents, blankies and some random pillows along with Ben's laptop. That was it. Unfortunately, for Aaron and Chelan, we forgot about our bird who would have been fried, so that's sad. Anyways, we loaded into the car and started driving. Emma asked us where we were going to go and we had no clue. We thought about folks in Abilene we could stay with but was that overkill driving an hour away? We ended up pulling up to Jack and Johnnie's and knocked on the door... "We can't stay at our house...", We said. They invited us in and we hung out for a little while. Jack felt confident that it wouldn't get close to our house because the wind had died down so Ben felt like going back to the house until we really, really needed to leave. One of our neighbors were the one's who advised us to head out and Ben thought maybe we could just wait for the policemen to kick us out... we loaded into the car and back towards our house only to be stopped by a police road block which answered our questions! We stayed the night at the Lusk's and prayed for the best. We took the kids to school in the morning and headed back to our humble abode. It looked just as we left it, thankfully, and there was no remnant of fire anywhere hear our house. The crazy thing is that I drove around to see exactly where it spread and it is so much further away than it looked. We could see so much firey blazes that I can't understand how it was where it was. There is probably fire areas that I can't see from the road which might explain something... That was a first for all of us and I hope we get some rain soon...( Nobone elses houses were damaged. Emma did say that one of her friend's cows got burned up... That's sad) I cleaned a lot at the house today and put back all our picture so that's good...