Wildfires were widely expected in Southern California over the weekend as hot weather and heavy Santa Ana winds marked the height of traditional wildfire season after one of the driest rain years on record.
I guess so. That's the fun of autumn in SoCal: warm, dry, beautiful ('cause the wind blew the smog elsewhere) weeks alternating with crisp, chilly weather and occasional dramatic storms moving down like snowbirds from the Gulf of Alaska packing thunder and the scent of sage. Mmm, mmm, mmm.
Here in NorCal—and I mean the real NorCal, not the Bay Area which everyone up here calls Central California. Here it's been raining for the past week: three-and-a-half inches—more than SoCal got all last year! And cold, or at least what I consider cold. Which, I am told, is not. It's Oaxaca all over again, where G and I would walk to work on winter mornings wearing short-sleeved shirts and pass joggers or other folks on their way to work wearing down parkas and knit hats. (Pinche, gringos! It's 70 degrees out. Bundle up!)
Now I'm the one bundling up for my walk to work, albeit in shorts, and passing locals wearing t-shirts and sandals. Sigh.
But if I'm having to adjust to the colder climate of Humbo, the real sob-story adjustment case in the New Vitality Homeland familia is Vivani Catpants. When we moved up here in the summer she found the weather "delightfully brisk" in her words, and no impediment to full enjoyment of a bug- and tree-filled back yard. But now that autumn weather has settled in her little tropical self is struggling to survive the bitter cold. She's gotten hugely fluffy now, but it's not enough and she's now sleeping under the covers at night, something she hasn't done since Tlaxiaco. I may have to bend my rule and provide a heating pad or two.
I'd get myself another coffee except she's sitting on my lap. Can't have those little pink tropical toes touch the floor, no sir!
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