Annadel Evening

The evening light over Annadel State Park last night was particularly nice and the trees in the neighbor's yard have finally changed color. They are not as fiery spectacular as usual, but we're fine with that.  I took this picture from our bedroom window, so it is the same view as we had at 2 am on the 9th of October when the whole ridge appeared to be on fire.

We realized today that we never got our mail for the days when the neighborhood was accessible only to emergency vehicles. We assumed that it was delivered once the post could get in again, but we are beginning to realize that we never got certain bills that we should have. One thing about being in the middle of a disaster is that even someone in a customer service center in Nebraska  knows about it and is very nice about cutting us some slack once we explain why we haven't paid our bills.

One thing we all got, even a friend of Jim's who lost everything except  his mailbox, was our property tax bills....one more thing for the county to sort out....

After the Berkeley Hills fire, the mail of people who lost their homes in the hills right above us was held at our post office, and there were long lines of people waiting there to pick it up. It was a very busy inefficient post office at the best of times and there never seemed to be enough clerks to serve the queues of people mailing parcels, much less find piles of mail stored in the back.

Although it seems like we never get anything but unwanted catalogs and advertising circulars in the mail, when it doesn't come we realize that there are a few things that are fairly important.

Tonight we are going to have what I call a "peanuts and potatoes" dinner. I was visiting my friends Jean and William who live in Bali and we were sitting outside feeling a bit lethargic, trying to figure out what to do about dinner. Jean said, "well, we could go out, or we could have peanuts and potatoes" which is all she had in the house. We had peanuts and potatoes....I'm not sure that is actually what we will be having, but I will try to rustle up something out of a fairly empty looking larder....