Santa Rosa Creek

It's quite low but still has a bit of water left in it. The poison oak is turning red even though it usually doesn't do that until August or September. Our friend Cindy lives above the creek on the right hand side. They had quite a bit of fire damage although, like us, their house was spared. I've never seen the rocks in that ground before because it was covered with trees most of which burned. Their well house burned and the pump fell into the well. Took ages to get that sorted.

It has been nine months since the fire and everybody we know around here is still waiting to start rebuilding. Soil and foundation engineers are required.to write reports and submit them to the county which must sign off on them. The foundation engineers can't do their survey (or whatever) until the soil engineers finish theirs. The soil has already been checked for contamination and the 'soil' here is 50% rock. What can a fire do to that? 

Water restrictions have been announced for most of the county ranging from 20 to 40% mandatory reductions. The basis for the percentage is last year's water usage when people were already cutting down, so green lawns and clean cars will become a thing of the past, and we will all be keeping buckets in the shower and bricks in the toilet. Since we have a well we won't be subject to the restrictions until the county decides to install meters on our well, but they haven't done that yet and we try to voluntarily comply with the restrictions. We're still thinking about getting a water tank but filling it becomes a kind of catch-22 situation....

It's actually perfect weather right now. We had lunch underneath our new umbrella.