Good Morning!

I had just gotten up this morning at about 7:15 to a strange and unfamiliar sound on the roof when OilMan walked in and announced, ‘the turkey has landed, and it's raining!' They sky is now clouded by real clouds and not by dirty brown smoke.

OilMan was terribly proud of himself because he was the fifth person to arrive at the store, but managed to do an end run around the other four to be the first person to pick up his turkey. A discussion ensued about which was more of a pain, standing in line for a few minutes to pick up a turkey or getting out of bed in the dark and driving through the rain to be first in line. Neither of us will ever convince the other of the rightness of their ethos. OilMan would never see the value of chatting with people in a festive mood whilst waiting in a queue, and  I would never concede the value of getting up in the dark to do anything....

The best news is that,hallelujah, it rained quite hard this morning. My friend Nancy and I hiked without complaint through the running gutters to get our coffee. I couldn’t resist sharing mine . The little fellow smiled up at me from the bottom of the cup until the last sip.

It seems a dreadful irony that the rain which should put out the last of the Camp fire north of us will also make it more difficult for the firefighters, the people searching the ashes for human remains and certainly for the people staying in tents in parking lots. There is, however a huge effort going on to organize Thanksgiving meals for 15,000 people.

One would think that if a group of volunteers can manage that in a town that has virtually burned to the ground, the government could organize some sort of housing to get these people out of the rain. I imagine gratitude is the farthest thing from their minds just now....