This is the after satellite picture of our house. The barn you can see is somehow still intact.

I wanted to come today and say thank you to all the Stiffs. First to Mancar for setting up the Go Fund Me page that 58 Stiffs contributed to as over this writing $2,660. I cannot thank all who contributed because most of you are anonymous or I don't know your real names, but thank you. I do not have the words to express how it feels to have such generosity from people I've mostly never met, only talked with on a nuggets website. Some were from people who have never commented on Stiffs at all. My wife is a bit baffled - she hasn't been on Stiffs and is a little confused about what happens here - and also very grateful.

This experience so far has been one of the most difficult I have ever had. The most similar experience I can compare it to was when my father died. Had you asked me this question 2 weeks ago, I would have told you it's just a house. As long as we got ourselves and the pets out alive, no that big of a deal. I've had that discussion with some of my best friends and gotten the same feedback - no big deal as long as everyone gets out. I'll tell you right now I was wrong. It took a couple of days and then the grief hit me like a ton of bricks. And it sometimes comes out of no where. You think to yourself "Oh, I need to change the oil in my car" and then you remember that the tools you have been buying since a kid are all gone. You run into the store to buy some clothes and you run into a family you've known for 15 years and talk about evacuating in pitch black smoke with a wall of flames on one side of the road. You give a woman a ride to pick up her car from the mechanic and she asks if you smoke because your car smells of it so much. You go to buy a new pair of shoes because every pair except the one on your feet is gone and you run into the woman you've been selling duck eggs. She tells you of receiving the evacuation call and screaming to find her pet cat and getting chased out of her house by flames a few minutes after finally finding him. There has been a lot of crying, not least by me.

We have only been able to spend a little time looking through the ashes of the house. Much of what we have found is pottery type stuff that doesn't melt. Most of it is broken because it was upstairs and fell into the basement when the house burned. This is one of the very few unbroken items we have found. My wife has made a habit of buying a santa from every country she has visited. She has quite a few from Europe, living there for 7 years with the army. This one is perhaps the only one to survive the fire - she got it in Spain about 25 years ago. It had a lot more color before the fire. She was so happy to find it intact.

We have relatively good insurance, so financially we should be okay. We have been living in a rental Airbnb condo, but have a house lined up to move into later this week. The insurance is paying for the rental and even for rental furnishings while we rebuild our house. Expecting that process to last 18 to 24 months, at least. A woman with a ranch near the rodeo in Fraser has taken our chickens, ducks, turkey, and peahens. The people at the Bar Lazy J ranch has taken the goats. Moving them and perhaps never getting them back was another major blow.

Mancar has said he'll transfer the funds raised from you kind people shortly. He even agreed to exchange the funds for all of his season tickets to be played at the Pepsi Center next season! :)

Our rental is in Granby - not too far from Doc_Giggles place. If anyone is going to be up in the area, give me a shout and we can get together if you like. The Stiffs are one of the things helping keep me sane as always, and you guys mean more than you can understand. I hope you are all doing well. I'm sure I left some stuff out and didn't say things perfectly - but thank you one and all.