Life intervenes

By -
I was all ready to post about some great books I've been reading, especially this one non-fiction title, but right now blogging about books is the last thing on my mind, so I thought I'd post something to let you all know what's going on.  We are just fine, but nobody else around here is...

Thursday morning a small wildfire sparked up on the ridge -- I live in a valley, but tucked up near the start of the mountains -- and it spread so fast.  This fire just exploded, and it turned out to be the Big One we all worried would come some day.  The winter rains haven't started yet, and everything is extremely dry.  Our lovely little neighbor town of Paradise was pretty well destroyed, while people escaped as fast as they could.  By evening, the fire was reaching the edges of our town too, but it's much easier to fight a fire on the valley floor, so although many people were evacuated, nearly all of them were able to go home the next day. 

Thursday morning
 
This fire is still raging -- it's up to 100,000 acres now, which means it has slowed considerably, but it's still only 20% contained at the moment.  They think it will take all month to get it completely controlled.  We have something like 40 or 50 thousand people displaced, many of whom have lost everything.  Many just don't know if their homes are still standing -- chances are slim, but on the other hand, structures we thought were lost have turned out to have survived.  The high school and the hospital are both surprisingly still standing, though it's a question whether Paradise can even be rebuilt. 

So many of our friends have lost their homes. Lots of folks are leaving town to stay with relatives -- if not because they're actually homeless, in order to escape the smoke.  The rest work at evacuation shelters.  School is cancelled for at least the next two weeks.  Suddenly there is nothing to do but watch the news and work at shelters or host people...find things to donate, that sort of thing.  Everybody is much too jittery to do much else.

So although I have plenty of free time now that I can't work and there's no school, I'm not sure I'll be able to blog either.  I guess I could put the 15yo on a Great Books reading program for a couple of weeks -- I'm a homeschooler again!

Man, California living is much more exciting than it ought to be.


Comments

  1. CleoNovember 10, 2018 at 10:31 AM

    That's just awful, Jean! We have many wild fires in our province but at this time of year they've died down so it's the last thing I expect to hear about in November! I can't imagine what it would feel like to lose everything and I feel so badly for those people. I do hope they're able to contain more of the fire soon. Going back to homeschooling may help to be a distraction. Keep safe and well!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanNovember 10, 2018 at 9:18 PM

    Thanks, Cleo. Yeah, our fire season normally lasts through October, but we still haven't had rain, and it's been windy, so...it's been terrible.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TracyKNovember 11, 2018 at 2:48 PM

    Very sorry to hear you are having to deal with the fire up there. Last December we suffered through that for weeks during the Thomas Fire. (We never had to evacuate but had secondary effects, some for weeks afterwards.) There are a couple of fires below us near Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, and Malibu.

    ReplyDelete
  4. oNovember 12, 2018 at 6:09 AM

    Oh, Jean. I'm sorry. I hope you stay safe. I saw it on the news last night before I read this and I was thinking of you as I always do now when there's problems in California. Take care, ok?

    ReplyDelete
  5. JeanNovember 12, 2018 at 8:17 PM

    Thanks, folks. <3 I really dislike wearing a face mask outside (they don't go well with glasses) but we are so fortunate.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more