What else can go wrong?

Just a few weeks ago I was thinking that we’d gotten lucky with a long string of nice weather this summer: highs in the low 80s, cooling down nicely in the evenings and mornings. I spent part of every week day working outside. And then our luck ran out.

First was the heatwave, a stretch of nearly a week where the temperature was hitting 95+ every day, on some days breaking 100. That sucked, but you could still open your windows up in the evening to bring in cooler air in preparation for the next day. And then a series of freak thunderstorms swept through (we almost never get storms, thunder or otherwise, between May and October) and set everything on fire.

Now we’ve got a fire complex to the southwest in the Santa Cruz mountains, one to the east-southeast in the hills to the east of San Jose and Gilroy, and one to the north in Napa and Sonoma (those two counties just cannot catch a break). You know a fire is big when they call it a “fire complex”, instead of just calling it a fire.

The fires are raging out of control and filling the air with smoke. Sometimes in the afternoons we get a breeze from the north that clears the air and allows us to venture outside for awhile, but as the air cools late in the day the smoke inevitably descends again. So now we’ve gone from being trapped at home by the pandemic but able to go outside, to trapped and home and able to go out in the evening once it cools off, to just being trapped inside.

It’s hard to avoid wondering what’s next. At this point it’s presumably going to be earthquakes (if our next disaster is California-themed) or locusts (if it’s biblical).