Category: California

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Fires, Smoke, Helicopters, and Evacuation Warnings

Oh My!

Fire is a way of life in California. It’s just a given, like hurricane season on the Florida Coast. Or tornadoes and trailer parks.

Tornadoes specifically target trailer parks, or so it seems.

This fire season is starting early. This first fire popped up about. 2.5 miles from my home. Flames were clearly visible from my vantage point and they were impressive!

To their credit the Local Fire Department, and California Department of Forestry jumped right on it. On the one hand, the location was fortunate. The origin point seems to have been right off a main paved road. On the other hand, a neighbor who works for CDF says this highlights just how much dry brush is on the mountains around us. Thus indicating the danger.

I wonder if the CDF thought it was novel to be able to drive up and get to work instead of having to slog their way through dense brush carrying all the gear they’d need in 85° heat, start working the fire itself.

Starting initially at about 35 acres, the fire has in two days spread to almost 1000 acres.

Planes, Helicopters, and Manpower have been working nonstop since the fire broke out on Saturday. Watching those pilots making precision water drops has been amazing to watch.

Once the fire is out, that part of town will have a natural fire break so long term it may be a good thing.

Thus far there have been no loss of structures. 300 homes were evacuated. These homes are in a valley area down the mountain a bit from my neighborhood. I feel fortunate that the fire didn’t roar up the canyon into our area. I feel sorry for the folks that had to evacuate. I’ve done it myself and was prepared to do it this time. It’s a pain in the butt. As of now, though the evacuated folks have homes to which they can return.

I know that relief too. It’s with great joy that I’ve come back to my home after days or weeks in a hotel or shelter and saw my house and neighborhood still standing.

To the readers, blog postings will be delayed and will probably consist of a day or two backlog showing up all at once.

Yesterday, all the fiber and copper communication lines burned. Shortly thereafter, the power went out for 6 hours or so. The power is back, but the estimate for the communication repair is next Monday at the earliest.

Apparently the hard communication line damage has affected the local cell towers, too. We’re down to one bar of 4G or LTE where we’re located. We’re the lucky ones. The rest of the town shadowed by mountains has no cell service at all.

That’s the long way of saying that even my cellular hotspot on my phone isn’t working worth a darn. Without that ability to connect my computer to the internet with speed and reliability I’m not going to be able to post very much.

Since the main copper hard lines are down, 911 isn’t working properly. It looks like local phone calls can be made within the town so folks have to call the fire dept building, then ask for them to dispatch whatever service is needed. The CERT team and HAM radio operators are also helping out.

I’ve been getting a lot of work in on other writing projects. I think this outage while inconvenient is actually a good thing in that regard.

With cool temperatures and relatively calm winds, the fire seems far less smoky today. I’m hoping that these conditions are helping the firefighters get a handle on it.

Until next time be safe.

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Why we can’t have nice things…

Four years ago I was leaving a grocery store near my apartment when a complete stranger walked up to me and commented on my watch.

It wasn’t uncommon for my colleagues to notice it or comment on it. It was not even that uncommon for a clerk in a shop to notice my watch, (particularly if they were male,) and say something like, “nice,” while looking at my wrist.

That day in front of the grocery store, this guy who appeared homeless commented about my watch in a very loud voice. He said something like, “That’s a really nice watch, what did that set you back 10 grand 15 grand?” What caught my attention was that he was speaking loudly enough for pretty much the entire shopping plaza to hear him. I’m a suspicious person, and in the back of my brain a thought popped in, “Why is this guy announcing this? Is he calling to an accomplice?”

I politely said in an equally loud voice, “Thank you for the compliment, it’s amazing how many compliments I get on this cheap $200 Hong Kong knock off. Would you like to hold it? “

At that point the man lost interest. Thank god he didn’t call my bluff.

This event was about the 3rd or 4th I’d experienced in 2 weeks. Admittedly, I wasn’t living in the best neighborhood at the time, but up to that point I hadn’t felt particularly unsafe.

The watch in question is not a knock off.

I purchased it 14 years ago for about 7K. I’d lost a rather large watch collection in a fire and decided that I simply wanted a single very nice watch that I never took off. I’d worn my watch continuously since I put it on in the store.

There were some who scolded me for wearing such a nice watch while doing yard work, working on a car, building, painting, swimming, or just living. I really thought nothing of it.

It is my watch, and since it was the only one I owned, it was easier to keep it on my wrist than to keep track of it, if I took it off.

The watch itself has held up very well. I sent it in for routine service on its tenth birthday. The service center gave it a tune up, and a clean bill of health. complemented me on two things. 1) it was in excellent shape and 2) that they’d guessed I wore it every day and thought that was very cool.

They didn’t even charge me for the replacement of 2 links in the band that had taken the brunt of a saw kickback. The watch band had saved me from a very nasty cut on my wrist. As part of the service the watch was also appraised. I was a bit shocked, and pleased, to discover that my watch had more than doubled in value.

After the repeated incidents in public where the watch garnered unwanted and intrusive attention, (it’s still considered rude to ask a stranger what they paid for something isn’t it?) I decided it was time to put my beautiful functional timepiece in a safe and buy something cheap and ubiquitous.

I’ve enjoyed the lockdowns over the past two years because if I’m around home, or in my little mountain town I’ve been able to wear my nice watch. I also wore it with complete confidence on a recent trip to Florida. Some men in Florida noticed my watch, they just nodded in appreciation, and smiled. You know… “Old School Politeness.”

My cheap watch is an Apple watch. It’s nice, but having to recharge it daily is a pain in the butt. The advantage is that everyone has one and in that homogeneity is safety.

No-one is likely to mug me for an Apple Watch.

The sadness is that my beautiful, simple, functional, watch sits in the safe. I do wear it if I’m camping, diving, or know that I’m not likely to encounter crowds of people. I also wear it more in the Winter when a jacket or long sleeves afford cover for it.

Within the past month or two, I read a news item where a man in Los Angeles had been robbed of his Rolex, at gunpoint after an induced car accident.

Today There was a report from England in The Sunday Times talking about an apparently organized group of thieves who are targeting high end watch wearers. The article is here and it’s brazen.

Most of the men report being approached by lovely women asking for their signature on a petition or something. In some cases the women become handsy and quite forward, talking non stop. In a few cases they’ve offered sex or other enticements.

Often the men are so flabbergasted they don’t realize their watch is gone until the woman has left.

I’ve heard of expensive hookers, but these guys aren’t even getting blow jobs for their 10 to 20K!

The article mentions that the thieves seem to be targeting Rolexes.

The supply of Rolexes is thin and the resale market is booming.

Rolex among other high end watches retain their value worldwide. They’re easy to transport, and with a hot resale market the thief can dump the merchandise quickly.

I’ve been jonesing for a watch that I can safely wear daily that doesn’t require recharging or batteries.

I guess you could say I’m bored with the Apple Watch and its attendant software updates, power requirements, and fiddling.

I think fondly of my nice watch. Ten years, one watch, and zero trouble. Ahh, simplicity!

I’d been looking at a nice simple Omega. But that too is a high end watch and subject to the same targeting by thieves. That being said, I may get one anyway.

I suppose that a venerable Timex might be the best way to go.

It does make me wonder how long will it be before we’re all driving the same car, all wearing the same clothes, all wearing the same watch, and all using the same mobile phone?

Is that where this is going, will we all be stuck with a “one size fits all” solution just to fight crime?

That’s not freedom. That’s the old Soviet Union, North Korea, or China. I want the freedom to have nice things without worrying about becoming a target.

I’m also just old school enough to want a concealed carry permit and a stout .45 on my hip. I’d rather leave the thieves gut shot and bleeding out on the sidewalk. (Why gut shot? Because it’s an agonizing death.) People don’t usually think of me, and mercy at the same time.

I find myself thinking that all it would take is 1 year of would be criminals stacking up in the morgues, and crime would be almost nonexistent. I figure we’d either run out of criminals, or criminals would decide crime itself was too risky.

Unfortunately, especially in California, criminals have been given the upper hand and they’re continuing to press their advantage. Apparently this is also true elsewhere in the world.

Maybe I’ll go with a Timex until I’m able to move to a state where they’ve remembered, “An armed society is a polite society.”

Maybe sometime in the near future folks will wake the hell up and realize The “Wild West” era came to a close in part because we all agreed that a robust police force was preferable to daily shoot-outs at the saloon.

That’s provided that the morons running things haven’t burned the history books or forgotten how to read them.

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A Rasmussen Poll has found that 63% of Democrats support voter ID.

There’s an article from Breitbart here The original Rasmussen Report is here.

I personally think that voter ID is a good thing and support it.

But as I was thinking about the way things get done in this country. Perhaps it’s time for a little reverse psychology.

If members of the other voting blocks (ie Non-Democrats) were to simply make it known that they thought “Fair is Fair”, and that in the next election and specifically in the 2024 election they were going to resort to dirty tricks to win the election…

You know, things like abusing mail in ballots. Voting in multiple districts where they do not reside. Buying homeless folks a meal in exchange for them voting “correctly”. “Helping”people fill out their ballots. Offering iPads to deep Blue lower economic districts, etc.

I guarantee that voter ID would be enacted inside a year. Racism and voter suppression, be damned. Of course we’d have to have the representatives of the other voting blocks in congress and at the state level screaming bloody murder about the unfair exclusion that such laws create.

Even if voter ID laws didn’t make it onto the books, if the other voter blocks were to actually follow through with all of the above shenanigans the court cases could fowl up the elections for months. It would no-doubt result in Vote ID laws being implemented.

My Mother says, “Two Wrongs don’t make a right,” maybe in this case she’s incorrect.

My Mother is also adamantly against voter ID laws. Her reasoning for this would be sound if there were a lot more people 90 years and older who hadn’t ever worked, or driven, or had a bank account, or utilities, or gone to the doctor, or written a check at a grocery store, or gotten a payday loan, or received a western union moneygram, or, or, or, or, or.

If there were hundreds of thousands of people like that who were citizens of this country then I’d agree with her. But there aren’t. The number of people who would be excluded from voting on those grounds is vanishingly small.

The number of illegal immigrants, or unvetted immigrants from the Middle East and elsewhere, who are not citizens and therefore shouldn’t be voting, on the other hand is rather substantial.

Given the implementation of RealID where the holder of the ID is designated as having met the RealID requirements and is either a citizen of non-citizen. It seems to me that all the bullshit about voter id has no legs to stand on.

If one were required to produce a passport to vote. I’d be against that. Passports are expensive and that expense would place an undue burden a large percentage of citizens who are eligible to vote.

That being said, If someone asked me personally to produce ID to vote, I’d happily hand them my driver’s license and my passport.

In state like California where there is no voter ID requirement. The polling people get pissy if you hand them your ID with your ballot. I had a lady in San Diego practically throw my driver’s license back at me.

I was dropping off my mail in ballot from another district at a polling place. I thought at least due to the irregularity of that circumstance that someone would check the name and address on the ballot against the name and address on my ID.

Nope! the lady very testily told me to put my ballot in the box marked “mail in”.

This was in the 2016 election and at the time I thought, “Wow, it would be really easy to stuff the ballot box.”

As a law abiding citizen, I’d never do such a thing, but I was surprised at the lax security. In that election, I’d voted for neither of the presidential candidates. I had however voted for a number of measures and local candidates that were important in my community.

At the time, I remember wondering if there was some way I should make the Presidential candidate section so that it was clear I had meant not to cast a vote for any of the candidates. I’ve still never gotten a good answer about that one.

The Rasmussen poll is interesting.

If 63% of the Democrats polled and 88% of the Republicans polled, and 74% of the Unaffiliated voters polled all are in favor of voter ID, why hasn’t it been implemented? Those percentages are better than the last presidential election. Obviously a large percentage of voters agree on something.

I wonder if Voter ID could be put to the people in the next California election?

I’d make a drink, and popcorn every night listening to the media lose their minds over a ballot measure like that.

Talk about an entertaining reality TV show…