I want to send a big shout-out to Keith and his group from Volunteers of America for coming up this past week and helping get the rest of the debris bags off the property.

We only have a small pile of metal scrap left to take away and a clean slate to work with.

I had planned to get more pictures of the clean-up, but we ended up on a big time crunch (sorry, Blake), so I’ll have to get them next week when we go up.

Things are beginning to happen fast. Our local recovery case manager is now talking to our federal disaster case manager. This way, we won’t have to be the go-betweens when we need to share information and risk something getting lost in translation. We have so many questions, we’re not sure what to ask. But now that we have most of the financing secured, we can get a formal bid to our team. Once we have that in place and get the blueprints for our new home, we can begin to lay the rest of the groundwork for the building.

We haven’t even begun to address the burnt trees that now adorn our property. At some point, we’ll have to cut down the dead and dying forest to make room for the new growth. I’d like to salvage as much wood as possible to use later. With the price of lumber these days, I can’t see turning the usable trunks into mulch. I’d rather turn them into boards.

That’s a job for later. Up until now, we’ve been focused on getting the rubble cleared. As our local case manager keeps reminding us: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.