Life: Idiotropic

I'm sitting at my office window trying to muster just a pinch of motivation on a day that I'd rather be napping in spite of the perfect autumn weather.  My hands have been hurting, so it's hard to type a lot which makes the whole blogging thing a bit of a pain, literally...

But I'm here... and then I see a pretty little yellow airplane go by and I think, "Oh what a beautiful day to be out in an airplane flying over the sea."  And then I see another go by and I think that it must be so nice to have a friend to fly with and what a treat it is for me to watch this little airshow right here from my office window.  They fly here and there and then they go and I forget about them until I hear a helicopter.  Huh.  That's odd.  And then I hear sirens.  Odder.

The helicopter is flying low over the hills in front of me.  It circles back and forth as if it's looking for something.  Then another comes.  The next one has a big red bag hanging from it.  This is when I run to the balcony and jump on my roof, running over to the chimney and carefully walking down just enough so that I can see the action.


It's a fire.   Two helicopters now are taking turns quickly dumping water on the dark grey smoke that's billowing up from the wooded mountain that we often hike on, then rushing off to different sites to refill.  One comes three times to a small reservoir among the orange grove just on the other hill behind me.  I can watch the entire scene from my roof, the fill up, the dumping, the return for more water.  He flies right over my head with veil of spray trailing from the bucket below.  By the time he's dumping the water on the fire, the mist has filtered down to me and I can feel the cold water droplets on an otherwise clear day.

The yellow planes come back a few more times, always together.  It isn't a joy ride after all.  They are dumping something on the fire.  The first time it's something white.  May be water, but I don't know.  The last time I see them, they're flying down low into the smoke, then coming out of it with a deep orangy red cloud billowing behind them.  A flame retardant, may be?

It's three hours from start to finish and it was interesting to see.  A bit of excitement to an otherwise dull day and it gave me a reason for less productivity.  Hard to accomplish much while running back and forth across the roof with camera in hand.  ;)