The dive-in movie is tonight, the sheriff says don't post that first-day photo, and 88 with storms

The Red Flag Warning got extended to 8 o'clock last night and then quietly went away, which is about as good as this week was going to end. Today's 88 with a 30% chance of afternoon thunderstorms, so the morning is the reliable part and the afternoon is a coin flip. Tomorrow is 91 and sunny, which is the one to plan around.

In today's issue: the Ada County Sheriff has an unusually blunt answer to a question every parent in West Ada just faced this week. The Big Grass Fire finally turned a corner — containment jumped twenty points in a day. The Western Idaho Fair opens Friday and there's a way in for a can of soup. Six things to do, one of them tonight in a wave pool. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: To show how much back-to-school content goes online in a single week, Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford cited the number of Instagram posts carrying one hashtag: "first day of school." Roughly how many are there? (Answer at the bottom.)

Good news and bad news. The good news is there is finally something tonight that has never been in here before. The bad news is it's the only thing inside the next seven days — everything else on this weekend's calendar (the downtown car show, the Main Street Market, the superhero fun run, the speed dating at the dog bar) has already run here, some of it twice. So the list starts tonight and then jumps to Aug 30. All six are new here and all six are physically in Meridian.

Tonight, Saturday Aug 15

Sunday, Aug 30

Friday, Sept 18

Monday, Oct 26

Wednesday, Oct 28

Sunday, Nov 1

Seventh issue running that the next-seven-days window comes up nearly empty. If you know something happening in Meridian that never makes it onto a calendar — a church thing, a park thing, a garage-sale-that-is-really-an-event thing — hit reply. That's the gap.

⛅ Today: partly sunny, high near 88, low around 58. A 30% chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after noon, with a south-southeast wind of 3 to 8 mph, then another 30% chance tonight before midnight. The live Boise readings this morning ran anywhere from 84 to 90 depending on which of their own widgets you believe, so 88 is the honest middle — and the afternoon is the part that could surprise you.

🔥 The Red Flag Warning is done. It got extended once, to 8 p.m. Friday, for gusty winds and more lightning, and then expired. Fire managers were blunt about why it wasn't over just because it rained a little: humidity is up and there were scattered light showers, but the fuels out there are still dry enough to burn the moment wind pushes a flame into them. Fire restrictions haven't gone anywhere.

🌤️ No air quality advisory. Third clear day, after three straight weeks of them. A Hydrologic Outlook is still sitting on the NWS hazard list, which is a heads-up about runoff, not an alarm.

📅 The week out: Sun 91 and sunny and hot, Mon 90, Tue 87, Wed 85, Thu 87. Tomorrow is the hottest day of the next seven and it's also the clearest, which is a fair trade if you were planning to be outside anyway.

Fine print: the NWS data feed froze again after exactly one refresh — today's pull carries the same Thursday-lunchtime timestamp as yesterday's, which is the third time this month it's done that. The numbers above are the Meridian point forecast, cross-checked against the live Boise readings and the current fire-weather product. They agree, so they're published. If they hadn't, you'd be reading a hedge instead.

West Ada's first week is done and your feed is full of kids on porches holding chalkboards. Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford was asked what age it becomes appropriate to post a child online. His answer was two words: "Over 18."

That's a harder line than most parents will take, and he knows it. His argument is about what a photo gives away rather than who sees it: a first-day picture can hand a stranger the school, the approximate time your kid leaves the house, and often enough the neighborhood. "It's easier than you think to find out who people are," he said. "We do it all the time as law enforcement. We use it to find suspects. But suspects can use it to find victims as well." Privacy settings don't solve that part, because the risk sits in what the image contains, not in who you meant to send it to.

The context is the numbers. Idaho's Crimes Against Children unit says tips involving child sexual abuse material have quadrupled, along with the arrests that follow them, and Clifford has asked Ada County commissioners to fund another detective who does nothing else. In Idaho everyone is a mandatory reporter, and the tools are public: the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children runs a Cyber Tipline, and both NCMEC and the Idaho ICAC task force publish age-appropriate material for talking to kids about it.

Reasonable people will land in different places on this. The version that costs you nothing: crop the school shirt, skip the school name, and don't post it in the morning.

CBS2/KBOI (Jenee' Ryan), published Aug 11 at 6:13 p.m. MDT

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We ran this fire on Wednesday at 555,000 acres and 35% contained, and the honest framing then was that it was still growing. It now stands at 582,226 acres and 54% contained — the acreage barely moved, and containment jumped twenty points in about a day. Thursday's cooler, more humid air knocked fire activity down far enough that crews could finally get into remote sections they'd been staying out of on safety grounds.

The scale of the thing is worth one number: the perimeter is 670 miles. Parts of that line have never had a person standing on them. Aircraft are flying it looking for smoke and heat, and an unmanned aircraft system is hunting hot spots because it can cross ground that has no road or trail to it. Where crews can physically reach the edge, they walk it and put out whatever is still warm.

Most of the operation has shifted to forward bases at Juniper and Owyhee — kitchens, showers and laundry went up Thursday — so crews aren't burning half a shift driving to the fire. A smaller camp stays at Jordan Valley. The whole thing started from a lightning strike on July 23.

For Meridian this is the answer to why the sky has looked the way it has for three weeks, and the first genuinely encouraging update in that stretch.

CBS2/KBOI, published Aug 13, updated Aug 14 at 9:48 a.m. MDT

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This is the one out-of-town item in today's issue, and it earns the space because half of Meridian goes. Gates open Friday, Aug 21, and opening day is CBS2 Day: from noon to 4 p.m., bring a non-perishable food item and admission is free, with the donations going to a Boise food pantry. Fair director Helen Baker's point about the timing is that a pantry needs to be stocked before the need shows up, not after.

The rest of the cheap days, since they never seem to be in one place: Sunday Aug 23 is Armed Forces Day, all day. Tuesday Aug 25 is $2 Tuesday — $2 admission, rides and food, noon to 4. Wednesday Aug 26 is Clock Out for Lunch, free admission noon to 2. Thursday Aug 27 is buy-one-get-one, noon to 4. Friday Aug 28 is Student Savings Day, noon to 4.

Everything else is what it always is — rides, exhibits, a corn dog you will regret and then order again next year. Baker's line about the whole thing is that the schedule isn't really the point: "For some families, a trip to the fair has become a tradition passed down through generations."

CBS2/KBOI (Giselle Fierro), published Aug 13, updated Aug 14 at 3:32 p.m. MDT

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Nearly five million.

That's the figure Sheriff Clifford reached for, and the reason he reached for it is that it reframes the question. One parent posting one photo is a private decision. Five million of them, tagged and timestamped inside the same two weeks every August, is a searchable database — and it's built and maintained, for free, by the people it puts at risk.

Worth saying plainly: he isn't describing a Meridian problem. The hashtag is global, the tip numbers he cited are statewide, and nothing about this week suggests your neighborhood is unusual. What's changed is that the sorting got cheap. Someone who wanted to find every kid starting at one particular school used to have to be there. That's the part the sheriff's office says is different, and it's why an office that spends most of its time on what happened keeps talking about what hasn't.