OilMan and Friends

I never would have thought that feed stores were the sort of place I would go out of my way to visit, but Swede's Feeds is an exception. OilMan had to find out if a bale of hay would fit in his car because he wants it to cover the dirt in his raised beds for the winter, and I said he wasn't putting it in my car....

They do have every kind of feed for every kind of animal. They also have the most delightful collection of metal sculptures of everything from life sized giraffes to larger than life chickens. We bought a rather restrained white egret with a fish in its beak to put next to Dana's rock river where the agave used to be..

We are slowly acclimatizing ourselves to seeing the full extent of blackened mountains and the fire lines that stopped just short of almost all of the Sonoma Valley vineyards. Somebody (I forget who) told us that there was a worst case scenario in place to sacrifice the entire town of Santa Rosa. I'm not sure I believe it, but then again a month ago we would never have believed the extent of what did burn. We cannot yet bring ourselves to resume using the Fontaingrove  Parkway, which is the quickest way to get to the other side of town. We even briefly considered building up there years ago and made a small deposit on a lot. It has all been reduced to rubble. For reasons nobody can explain there was only one little cul de sac of ten houses in the entire development which survived the flames.

We went to a fabulous birthday party at the house at the end of the road, given by the Spanish/Italian couple who live there. Multilingual, but it didn't really matter because the music was so loud we couldn't really hear each other anyway. We danced, ate, drank, danced some more and really enjoyed a carefree evening. It was especially impressive to see one of Daniella's Italian friends, Giuseppe, toiling away over a huge cauldron of what turned out to be the best lasagne I've ever eaten. He had even made the pasta by hand. And the best focaccia I've ever eaten came from an Italian restaurant here in town and was brought by the owner.

Daniella and Federico just brought back the table and chairs they borrowed, along with a bowl of risotto and some of Dani's trademark tiramisu. We hadn't seen much of them since I woke them up at 2:30 on the morning of the 9th. We are so pleased that they will be staying at the end of our road....