The temp has dropped. Yesterday, it hit 88 here in SB; pretty darn high for this time of year. But the Santa Ana winds will do that; I remember a Christmas where the temp was over 80. The winds too have dropped.
Brother Dave wrote saying he and Sister in Law Teresa were just fine, that Brother Steve was OK and had tried to get back to the Resort but had to turn around and go back to Brother Dave’s what with the traffic being completely impossible.
Brother Dave had a cancerous cell removed from his cheek. It was a squamous cell; it takes a long time for them to metastasize and they caught his plenty early. Still to make sure it doesn’t come back they cut out a good deal of flesh skin around the cancer. Dave says he has a lot of stitches.
I had one of those on my lip years ago. I don’t think we were meant to be out in the sun a lot, genetically speaking.
The condo is still a mess. The new dry wall has been hung but now it has to be finished and the work on every thing will not be completed till next week. Meanwhile all surfaces are covered with a thin layer of dust and grime from the fire and the dust storm. I guess we will leave this stuff there till the repairs get done.
I remember reading JP Sartre, years and years ago, and he said something like, “There is no such thing as a natural disaster.” That blew my mind back then. What is the idiot talking about? Then I saw his point was really simple. No law says people have to build their homes right on a fault line or in the middle of dry brush. He is right. Sure the winds were tremendously high, but people have foresight, or prudence, and they could have exercised it by not building in the middle of a flood plain or something, but that would run contrary to the California way of life which is to build, build, build with minimal or no zoning.
If a natural disaster is something inevitable, this wasn’t or at least the degree of the destruction wasn’t. I do believe Sartre would accept (though he is now dead—death being truly an inevitable natural disaster) having the world destroyed by a meteor might count as a natural disaster. But then there would be nobody around to think about natural disasters. So who cares?
