House Finch

As Ozzie and I walked around the neighborhood this morning I realized that my energy was finally coming back, and I had some for the task at hand, which was to clean the floor after a rainy day of door installation, muddy footprints and lots of sawdust and little pieces of wood and dust. The dust and dog hair gets trapped in the spiderwebs and the result isn't pretty.. It is a beautiful day today, but more rain is predicted. As Candy, our dental hygienist says, "I'm solar powered". 

A lot of people are being reimbursed by their insurance companies for cleaning due to smoke damage. I suppose we could too since we are in the same neighborhood as some of them, but we already cleaned our house, and there didn't seem to be more than the usual amount of dust (granted, it was probably made up of equal parts ash and soot) so I suppose the adjustor wouldn't find anything now. I wonder if they would reimburse me for my time? I don't think we would ask, although heaven knows we've been paying homeowners' insurance for 50 plus years and made only one small claim in all that time....

There has been a lot of money raised for fire relief...$50 million from one benefit concert alone, given at AT&T park in San Francisco last weekend by several Bay Area Musicians. The local paper , The Press Democrat, in conjunction with  businesses banks and credit unions, has raised millions in donations from local residents. We decided to donate the money we would have spent on Christmas presents. 

It seems cruel, but people still have to pay off their mortgages, even if their houses burned to the ground. A friend of Jim's discovered that his house was a total loss, but he still had his mailbox. When he looked in it, he found his property tax bill. I imagine that it will be recalibrated, but nobody knows yet how the city is going to recover from the hit it has taken.

I ran into a friend today who told me her fire story. A neighbor came to her house at 2am. The power was out and he  knew that her elderly mother lived with her, and said the neighborhood was going to be evacuated and he was trying to give her extra time to get her mother ready. She helped her mother up, said she was going to pack some things and left her mother to get dressed. When she came back, her mother clad only in a pair of trousers, was still standing in her closet. "Mom", she said, "what are you doing? We have to go. You need a top. "But", said her mother, "I can't tell what color my pants are." She may have been evacuating from a fire, but she wasn't about to do it in a top that didn't match her pants!

We all have our standards....