Cal Fire Trucks

There is a drought going on here. It hasn't rained since January. The grass is dry and crisp. By the end of May, the city was already $150,000 over budget on water for its parks. They skies are blue and the temperatures are perfect. We moved here for warmer weather and I am not going to complain about the fact that there is a drought! I don't love foxtails, but otherwise I love this weather. I can live with brown grass in the parks. In Berkeley there were no parks, so I figure we're ahead of the game!

This morning we took Ozzie to his new watering hole in Spring Lake Park and the Cal Fire Trucks were parked in the parking lot. We encountered the firefighters running through the park and up and down the trail to the top of the dam. Everyone is poised for wildfires with all the tinder dry grass surrounding us. These men and women are prepared for the difficult job of fighting wildfires and I admire them tremendously. They are young, fit and extremely friendly--just another group who use our local park for all the right reasons....

Our old friend, the cowboy from Montana is visiting us.. He called from Oregon, got directions, got lost, spent the night in a motel ten miles down the road, and finally showed up yesterday morning, about 18 hours late. He runs about 100 head of cattle on his ranch in the Jefferson River Vally, about 50 miles SE of Butte. His house, which he built himself, sits on a bluff above the valley with a beautiful view of the very river that Lewis and Clarke traveled during their amazing pioneering trip to find a river route from St. Louis to the West Coast, ending up at the mouth of the Columbia River on the border between what is now Oregon and Washington. The descriptions of their adventure are fascinatingly portrayed in Stephen Ambrose's book, Undaunted Courage.

For his vacation, we are taking him a long way from cattle country to Wine Country and all our favorite haunts. It is always a pleasure to do this, especially with an old friend who spends most of his time raising cows and and alfalfa in Big Sky country....