Reset Twenty-Two, Day Thirteen.
The airplanes flew Monday, and they did indeed wake me up a couple of times. A twin engine jet just a few hundred feet over your roof gets pretty loud, even when the building is well insulated. There were probably at least a couple dozen flights over the neighborhood, and after I got up, about two o'clock, I would go outside to watch them pass over. They are quite large, and knowing that it is just the draft of air running over them that keeps them aloft is a bit disconcerting, but there is also something comforting about their passage. It's probably knowing that they are helping to beat back the fires that are consuming the fields and forests.
The fires didn't expand much Monday, though containment on the Dixie fire is now down to 22%. It's likely to be a long time before it's under full control, and in the meantime there are likely to be a lot of smoky days. The next week will bring triple digit temperatures again, and (even worse) nights in the seventies. I'm not really expecting any relief from all this heat until at least September, and maybe we won't get it even then. A few decades ago we sometimes got serious rainstorms in September, but not any more. We're lucky to get rain by December now. We've got San Bernardino's climate now. Our climate has decamped to Oregon.
Well, that's all depressing and I don't feel like being depressed. I picked a few more bunches of grapes in the back yard Monday afternoon, and finally remembered to water out there. I also remembered to plug the cellphone in to recharge before it went dead tonight, so I'm not running as late as I did the last two nights. And I found an old jar of honey roasted peanuts with quite a few left in it, which I'm having for a bedtime snack. They are a bit stale, but I can live with that. I eat a lot of stale stuff, since I keep forgetting I've got things. My memory is one of those things that will probably never come back, like California's autumn rains. It was nice while it lasted, but I guess I can get along without it, until I don't.
Now I'm going to go read another chapter of Scoot Fitzgerald's first novel, "This Side of Paradise" before I go to sleep. It's about a hundred years old now. That's about how long Jane Austen had been dead when Fitzgerald started writing it. That's a long time. But somehow Fitzgerald's world seems closer to ours than it does to Austen's. I blame jazz. It changed everything.
The fires didn't expand much Monday, though containment on the Dixie fire is now down to 22%. It's likely to be a long time before it's under full control, and in the meantime there are likely to be a lot of smoky days. The next week will bring triple digit temperatures again, and (even worse) nights in the seventies. I'm not really expecting any relief from all this heat until at least September, and maybe we won't get it even then. A few decades ago we sometimes got serious rainstorms in September, but not any more. We're lucky to get rain by December now. We've got San Bernardino's climate now. Our climate has decamped to Oregon.
Well, that's all depressing and I don't feel like being depressed. I picked a few more bunches of grapes in the back yard Monday afternoon, and finally remembered to water out there. I also remembered to plug the cellphone in to recharge before it went dead tonight, so I'm not running as late as I did the last two nights. And I found an old jar of honey roasted peanuts with quite a few left in it, which I'm having for a bedtime snack. They are a bit stale, but I can live with that. I eat a lot of stale stuff, since I keep forgetting I've got things. My memory is one of those things that will probably never come back, like California's autumn rains. It was nice while it lasted, but I guess I can get along without it, until I don't.
Now I'm going to go read another chapter of Scoot Fitzgerald's first novel, "This Side of Paradise" before I go to sleep. It's about a hundred years old now. That's about how long Jane Austen had been dead when Fitzgerald started writing it. That's a long time. But somehow Fitzgerald's world seems closer to ours than it does to Austen's. I blame jazz. It changed everything.