Blue Sky at Last

You can't imagine how monochromatic the past week has been. You can't imagine what it's like to spend a summer day shut up in your house with all the doors and windows closed against the smog and smoke.

Today the air is sparkling clear, and the sky is strangely blue. To celebrate, I set up the solar oven and baked a loaf of bread.

It's not that the fires are out--123 fires are still burning in Mendocino County. I think it's just that the wind has shifted. Last week's offshore winds came from the North and East. Now the wind is coming from the ocean, blowing the smoke into the central valley instead of south to Sonoma County. The lightning strikes that were expected on Saturday and Sunday were postponed until today, but apparently have hit mainly in the Sierra, where there are new fires today.

And here in the North Bay, today's 89-percent humidity (compared with last week's 13 percent) have made it a lot harder for new fires to get started. Unfortunately, there's a long, hot, dry summer ahead of us, with dry lightning becoming even more likely in July and August.

Hot & Smoky

No, it's not some kind of spicy barbecued meat by-product. It's the weather in Sonoma County this week.

With over a hundred 131 fires raging in Mendocino County just upwind of us, we are enveloped in a sort of brown fog with a watery orange disc in place of the sun.

Of course, there are the wags who suggest that not everyone will want to avoid inhaling the smoke from Mendocino.

Click on the picture for the credit and story in the Santa Rosa newspaper.

There are more than 800 1,000 fires in Northern California. One of them is threatening Shingletown, east of Redding, where my sister and her husband have had to evacuate their newly built log cabin retirement home. Thank goodness, that fire seems to have been brought under containment.

After a week of staying indoors with the doors and windows closed, I couldn't stand it anymore and opened things up this afternoon. The air seems to be freshening a bit and is forecast to get better tomorrow.

BUT: Lightning is forecast for Mendocino County tomorrow and Sunday, which could start another round of wildfires. And many of this week's fires in remote areas are still growing because there aren't enough firefighters to go around.

It's early in the fire season, but thanks to a total failure of rain in March and April, California is bone dry already. I can only imagine what the rest of the summer will be like. I can only wonder if this condition is going to be permanent--this is the second extremely dry summer in a row, a condition predicted by the global warming experts, just like the Midwest floods were predicted.

If things get hot and dry enough that we no longer have a Sierra snow pack to draw on in the summer, we are going to be SOS. Bye-bye swimming pools. Bye-bye golf courses. Bye-bye landscaping. Bye-bye daily showers? Will we have to stop flushing our toilets and dig outhouses in the back yard? At best, will we have to ration water and pay gasoline prices for desalinated water from the ocean?

The Long Hiatus

My nose is getting raw. No, it's not allergies; it's that grindstone. I've been inordinately busy.

I just finished a long article on community choice aggregation in Marin County. What is community choice aggregation, you say? It's a way that communities can take power back from the big utilities that supply our energy. In our case that would be Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

Communities can form their own energy-buying consortium and buy energy directly from the suppliers. This comes in handy if you want to add more renewable energy to the mix than PG&E can give you. Making the change is a several-year process, and since the law (AB 117) that allowed CCAs in California only went into effect in 2003, Marin is only the second community to seek a CCA.

I've never been invited to write a 2,400-word article. Mostly I have to squeeze the details--however complicated--into 800 words or less.

A few months ago I joined BNI--Business Networking International. Each local chapter includes one person from each business category. They didn't have a writer, so I joined. It's expensive, but I've gotten nearly enough business from them to pay back my fees, with some big jobs in the offing. All this has made my free time very scarce, however. Tomorrow I have to work on a brochure for a client, arrange interviews for the next Sonoma Seniors Today, and prepare a 10-minute presentation for my BNI chapter--something that each member does once a year or so. Tuesday I'm meeting with a woman who wants help writing her book proposal. I have to call another lady about her book.

I'm not complaining. I just took out the last of my savings to pay living expenses. I need the money. It just takes some getting used to. And there's so much to do--my Web page, my writing blog, my own brochure. All that "business" stuff I've been avoiding all my life.

But today....

I went out in my bathrobe to set up the solar oven for the bread I'm planning to bake today and water the corn and squash seedlings in my new garden bed in the back yard. Later I will make tortillas and put together a batch of burritos using the beans I cooked yesterday in the solar oven. Why do I make my own tortillas? So I can add the forbidden ingredient--lard!--that is now omitted from all commercial tortillas in favor of some flavorless vegetable shortening concoction. Don't tell my clean-living friends.

Tomatoes have sat too long in their containers and must be planted today. The compost that's been sitting in the driveway for weeks has to be moved to the back yard for another new garden bed. My own compost heap awaits turning.

I have a knitting project to finish before a June 7 baby shower. A solar oven workshop to plan for June 22.

These are the things I crave to do much more than sitting before my computer churning out marketing copy. But life is about compromise.

Okay, I'm still in my bathrobe, writing in bed. Time to get up and get the bread started.

Liberals are the new Cassandra

We all know the story of Cassandra. In the Greek myth, Cassandra was the daughter of Trojan king Priam. She was loved by Apollo, who taught her prophecy, and tried to seduce her. When she refused, he placed a curse on her: no one would believe her prophecies, even though she was always right.

It was Cassandra who warned the Trojans not to let that big wooden horse through the walls.

Liberals are the new Cassandra. So reviled are our prophecies that we are often ashamed of ourselves. Most of us can't even stomach the word "liberal." No, we are "progressives," a Republican term borrowed from the era of Teddy Roosevelt.

Yet time after time, our prophecies come true. We predicted the disaster in Iraq, the economic meltdown we're now experiencing, the petroleum shortage, the resurgence of Al Qaeda-like extremism in the Middle East, and the ravages of global warming that are already impacting low-lying areas in the Pacific and the polar ice caps.

We are the new Cassandra. Long after our prophecies have come true, we are ignored and even reviled in favor of those pundits on the right who were wrong and yet are still consulted on all the news programs. Those are the "prophets" who predicted a cakewalk in Iraq, the fanciful idea that lower taxes increase tax revenue, the "liberal hoax" theory of global warming, the notion that we could wipe out extremism by military force abroad and by limiting our civil rights at home. With a track record like that, why are these people still being consulted?

Like Cassandra, liberals continue to be branded as crazy or even malevolent. Yet our predictions come true, with monotonous regularity. The next time you scoff at a crazy liberal prediction, take notes. Knowing the future can come in handy.