Brother Dave said, Be Prepared! when he opened the door.

 Oh my God!

We were worried about what to do with the two heavily motorized wheel chairs Joan and WB had in  their last days.  The batteries were long dead.  And we didn't know who would take them even as trash.  We thought about illegal action.  But about two a fellow drove by in his Suburban Truck and asked what we were going to do with them.  We said, Sir!  You can have them (please) if you want them,  He said his church could use them.  So we set to moving the things. 

 Note the powerful muscles in my arm!

 Heave Ho! On Three!

 We contemplate our handiwork.

“Couldn’t load blog; perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?—Loading data failed with SQL error.  Can’t open file: ‘mt_blog.MYI (errno:145)”

You are a better man than I if you can figure what that means.  And what’s this chummy little and “perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?”

So I do what I always do in such a situation.  The same thing over and over and over again—I hit the button to open the file and over and over and over again I got the same error message.  Really frustrating—the best parallel I can think of is calling the same number over and over and getting no reply because, as the Brits say, the line is engaged.

Funny, they say the line is engaged and we say the line is busy.  I like engaged better.

Anyway, the analogy is not too bad because the problem was a failure of communication between Yahoo Small Business, the host for my blog, and Movable Type, advertised as the most powerful blog software system now available for the purposes of blogging. So I am able to get the host interface but I cannot get the host interface to interface with the MT interface.

I went on idiotically in a state of high anxiety trying to figure out what I could do before I finally tried to contact somebody.  I tried to contact Yahoo and I actually stayed on hold FOR OVER AN HOUR till I got this guy whose name was Nick, just like mine, located in the Yahoo call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  This was strange because Carol and I watched a movie just the other night called, “The Big Nothing,” that was a comedy about people working in a call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  So I asked Nick if he had seen that movie and he said he had but that he didn’t work for a call center; he worked for Yahoo.  OK.

He wasn’t able to fix anything and sent off an email to Movable Type to see if they had any help.  I figured if he could do that, so could I, though doing so was not nearly as simple as it might seem.  In any case, I got through to MT via email and they got back to me really quickly.  The MT person, Stacy, wrote that my MT system had become corrupted.

This made me feel really bad.  I don’t know what the hell my MT had been doing to get itself corrupted, maybe drinking a lot, or hanging out with the wrong crowd, or whatever the hell a database does to get corrupted.  I felt as if I had been a bad father to my database and somehow it was my fault it had got itself corrupted.

Bad database!  Bad!

But Stacy gave me some directions to uncorrupt my MT.  Unfortunately I got these at 9 PM, after Carol and I got back from seeing Hellboy 2 in an actual movie theatre.  I don’t remember the last time we did that.  But I decided we should do it so I would be cut off from my computer and not spend the whole evening compulsively trying to fix it.  So instead, I woke up way too early because I was anxious to see if Stacy’s directions for the de-corruption of my MT would work or not.

Apparently they did.

Now I have to write Stacy and asked what I can do to keep my MT database from getting all corrupted again.

Bad database!  Bad!

Oh, Hellboy 2 was pretty OK.

Still to come: Carol, Brother Dan and I fly down to San Diego where along with Brothers Dave and Steve and Sister-in-Law Teresa we will empty the storage area containing the last of Joan and Bill’s material possessions.

Knock on wood.

It’s really depressing.  I have tried to stop I don’t know how many times.  I won’t go into that.  It’s a pretty pathetic story.

I am at a spot in the process I know all too well.  It’s the I-Am-Stuck spot.  I have cut back for several days to 1 cigarette one day, then 2.5 the next, then back to 2, and I can’t seem to get over that final hump.

Meanwhile the withdrawal is killing me.  I can’t concentrate on anything.  I can’t read. I can’t write.  If I try to watch a movie, the damn thing irritates me so much I want to throw things.

I ache all over.  My face hurts!

I saw my psychiatrist Friday, for one of my thrice annual visits; I told him what I was doing and so we decided to up the Wellbutrin from a mere 75 milligrams per day to 150.  So far that has made no difference.

Well, maybe it did because last night I tried to go sleep but had this ringing or more like high pitched screaming in my left ear. Tinnitus, I guess.  So I couldn’t get to sleep.  I got up and walked around and jumped up and down and hit myself up aside the head and opened my mouth as far as I could and squirted liquid in my ear, and still the noise wouldn’t go away.  So I got maybe 5 hours sleep.  Not nearly enough—by about half.

This morning, thank god, it’s still there but much, much reduced from last night.

But now I feel anxious that I am going deaf…maybe that noise was the last squeal of a dying ear nerve or something.

And anxiety is really not good when one is trying to stop smoking.  I have plenty of that anyway without having to worry about going deaf.

I need to clean my ears more because I lot of ugly stuff came out when I squirted water up there with a little plastic squirter.

This morning we meet some friends who have come into town for a funeral at a little, nearby restaurant and we talk for a while and start figuring our plans for the day and—bingo—the juice goes off.  End of all plans.  My friend wanted to go to the UCSB library, but is it open?  Carol wanted to go work out, but is the club open?  Me, who the hell knows what I wanted to do—but probably it involved the use of electricity.

This juice stuff has been going on for a week now and it’s more than an irritation now; it’s pretty much a painful aggravation.

I started talking about the PDA’s people have—like the Blackberry—that allow you to go online and watch movies if you want on your telephone, and thought maybe they should design one with a tiny pull out grill so that in case of juice outage you could fry up like a miniaturized burger or something.  But that would of course require that they build in a miniature refrigerator.  So I sat there trying to imagine a PDA with a built in grill and refrigerator….

You open up the tiny door to the tiny refrigerator to see if the milk is still good.

We are the only people sitting in the dark little restaurant.  I ask if it’s OK if we sit there and they say it is.  The owner starts putting out little candles. But when I go to get coffee I see they are not really little candles at all but little things that look like candles but are power not by fire but by batteries.

We get back to the condo to find this tall guy with tattoos all over his body pulling up the planks of our deck out back.   This is our carpenter’s son.  I am glad to see him because he was over in Iraq and I was afraid he would get killed.  He is pulling up the planks because Carol wants to get our own jacuzzi, but before that we need to get the deck fixed up (it looked pretty ugly) and also get supports under where the two tons of jacuzzi will go.

I am not in favor of this jacuzzi for numerous rational reasons—oh, well, this is not the place to go into that….And I should wrap this up before the juice goes off again…

Soot and ash all over everything.  Cars, bushes, driveways, rooftops.  I saw a kid skate boarding with little plumes of dust rising up from his rear wheels.

Also are the outages out?  Hard to tell.  I thought they were over yesterday morning, but we had half dozen outages for briefer and longer stretches from around 1 PM to 6 yesterday afternoon.

The fire in official speak was at first called an event.  Since the event started, they would say, or the event seems to be going this way or that.  Later the fire was downgraded from an event to an “incident.”  The “incident” seems to have started when the Feds moved in and took over the “event” management.  That’s what the top Fed dog called it: an “incident.”  Personally, I think it’s neither an event nor an incident but a fire.

This afternoon they will have another news briefing about the “incident.”

It’s just like it in the movies.  The locals never like it when the Feds move in.  The woman who had headed up the locals mispronounced the name of the new Fed boss.  Clearly she did not like turning over the reins to the Feds.

Early on, on the second day maybe, I had the TV on without the sound.  I began to hate this woman who was talking even though I didn’t know what she was saying.  I told Carol, this is an awful person.  She is full of bullshit.  So I turned on the sound to see if I was right and sure enough I was.

She was a spokesperson for the Chamber of Commerce.  Make no mistake, she kept saying, Santa Barbara is still open for business.  Meaning of course, open for tourism.  Just like in Jaws.  The locals want to keep quiet about the shark so the tourists won’t get scared off. 

Like come on up, SB is open for business. Bring your asthmatic children and elderly and you can stay in a motel room with no air conditioning because the electricity keeps going off.  Amazing.

Really, if I had a BS meter tuned to local TV and radio reports on the “incident,” formerly none as an “event,” the thing would be measuring off scale.

If I hear once again about how “the community is coming together” I will puke.

The fire appears to be moving away from us and was this morning 28% contained.  Mandatory evacuation orders for some areas have been removed and people are able to get back to their homes.

Fire Warnings for other areas have also been removed. Still the fire could continue to burn, at considerable distance from us, for a week or more up towards the north (away from us) and to the west.

Yesterday for the first time since the start of the fire we walked out to the bluffs.  Properly attired.

This morning we walked out again and got a call from Cousin Janet while sitting on the beach.  Very good to hear from her.  Thanks for the call, Janet.

We are very lucky with our local beach. No access road runs to it; one has to walk.  Given the aversion of many Americans to any form of exercise, the beach remains relatively people free.  Surfers hang out.  An occasional jogger passes, and people walk by with their dogs.

One cure for the obesity crisis might be to give every American family a large dog, one of the types that require at least 1 30 minute walk a day.

Perhaps I am returning to my normal aggravated state since I now seem to have the energy to have crabby thoughts about my fellow Americans.

 Properly attired.

The juice went off yester evening only twice and only about twenty minutes each time.  That was a bit of a relief.  But the condo was very uncomfortably warm by about 6 PM.  We had been keeping the windows closed to keep out the terrible air.  But finally about 6 we had to open them for a while to let some cooling air in, though it was not all that cooling and smelled of smoke.

We are fairly tired out from not sleeping properly and from this arduous business of staying vigilant.  But we are not in any immediate danger; in fact, while the fire continues only about 15% contained and with authorities still authoritatively insisting that they are not in control of the fire at all (and thus we should remain vigilant), I think we are in less danger than yesterday.

Were it not for the terrible air—and it is quite terrible—and the need to remain eternally vigilant I might be able to return to my normal state of low grade anxiety and returned to thinking about somewhat less immediate concerns such as the collapsing economy.

Here's a link.

And the fire receives mention in the NY Times. 

OK.

Our big outing for the day was going to wash off the cars.  The soot and ash looked so bad that to my eye it threatened the paint. So we drove over to one of those wash your car your-self places, put in our quarters and washed down both cars.  Carol’s is now back in the garage.  We had it out of the garage in the first place because we were not sure, if the power went out, if we could get the car out.  We think we have figured out that problem.

Here's a pretty recent article.

And short updates on Twitter.  

Yester evening, the juice went off round seven, came back round eight, went off again round 930, and then came back on round 11.

Listening to folks calling in to one radio station from different parts of the area was tough.  People were very nervous.

At the moment—about 8 PST—the fire is said to have burned about 5000 acres, but only one home has burned so far, that I know of, and no life has been lost.

We can look out our upstairs window and for the first time in three days see no smoke.

The fire appears to be heading more towards Santa Barbara and back up over the mountains.

Here’s a link to the best article I have found.  There’s a good map midway down the page and the article raises questions—ones I have—about the way the whole thing was managed and the incredible lack of preparedness for things like this fire.

One cannot entirely blame the government.  For years now the people of California have voted against measures and taxes that would build up the public sector and strengthen the infrastructure.

And on a sad note, I see that Bozo the Clown died.  Good bye Bozo.  Along with Hoody-Doody you were among the first TV characters I ever saw back in the mid 50’s.

I was a bit alarmed to hear a spokesperson for the fire people say that when one gets right down to it whether or not or more precisely when the fire stops has more to do with the weather than any form of human intervention.  Tonight and tomorrow those sundowner winds that blew the fire to its present proportions will happen again.  On the upside the humidity is not nearly as low as it could be, and the fireperson went on, monsoon like conditions, with wind but with high moisture are likely this weekend, with the possibility of even of a thunderstorm or two Monday.  He seemed really happy at that prospect, while I was alarmed to feel that this fire business may drag on a week, with the potential, throughout of something really unexpected and untoward happening.  Like another fire—or hurricane winds that might lift the fire who knows where.

Still, I gather that we are not likely soon to be burned out.  But the chance of another power outage this evening remains very high.

Great.

Fire during blackout from condo window. 

The best written coverage I have found appears in our local Independent, a free paper subsisting on ads. 

Below a picture taken about about 6 PM PT from our upstairs window.  Flames faintly visible, approximately 3 miles away:

The picture below as taken about 3 PM:

 I suppose I could sit outside in the falling ash and totally depress myself by watching the progress of the fire down the hill.  But I think I will forgo that and mostly stay inside--which is where the authorities say a person should be considering the air quality.

For a while at least, updates on the fire may be found by clicking here. 

Much to my embarrassment I failed to remember that I had met Amy at the funeral for Joan.  Now I recollect that she, her sister, Emily, and her brother, Ricky, were all there last year.  Amy reports that her mother is recovering well from her recent surgery.

Also I just learned Emily works at Thornwell Home for Children in Clinton.  She is a family teacher (houseparent) for 7 teenage girls and Amy works as secretary/receptionist for First Baptist Church in
Clinton. 

In celebration of finding his new house, Brother Steve treated Carol and me to dinner at a restaurant called 120 Musgrove, conveniently located at 120 Musgrove.

That's Steve's rental, the green one, right there in front.  And next to it the car Carol and I rented; we rented with it a GPS.  Having never used one of those before I found it a hoot, though quite inaccurate on more than one occasion.

Intersection with train.  Golden Arches visible to left.

Close up on train.