Hill Viineyards

There are times when I despair. The political situation is unspeakable, the state  is on fire despite having the power turned off... everything seems insurmountably  difficult. But then I stop on my morning walk and look at where we live....
These vineyards are on the face of the mountain across the road which I can see from my kitchen window. 

I can't even bring myself to think about the incompetent, fool who is ruining our country, but this is California. He doesn't like us because as a state we have done everything we can to thwart everything he does. He won't do anything for us that he doesn't have to, but we won't vote for him either....

There are times when I have to admit we live in a sort of charmed bubble, but  things do go wrong here,  and when they do, everyone pitches in and helps. Friends offer everything from a warm meal to a warm bed. Coffee shops stay open just so people can recharge their phones and have a hot drink. Fire crews from all over the country show up to fight the wildfires. We and they have learned a lot about creating defensible spaces around our houses, using meteorologists to predict winds and map the direction of the fires.

I don't have anything very good to say about the top executives of PG&E, but the linesmen and pilots and drivers who work for the company are out there 24/7 to get the power back on. I just wish they had better bosses who don't seem to care about their employees any more than thay care about their customers.

There are some cascading effects of these outages...power surges have damaged the electronic ignitions on several appliances which will have to be repaired, but now that we've had a week or two to think about it, we realize that we have  far more to be grateful for than we do to complain about.

Temperatures have been dropping to 28º at night and we have been greeted by a frosty landscape the last couple of mornings. We've had one rainstorm and another one is expected tomorrow. We also have a good view of the solar panels on the garage roof from the kitchen window. It's a visual oxymoron that almost as soon as it was finished, the first sight to greet us was solar panels covered in frost....