Abstract Landscape

In the interests of full disclosure, this is a picture I took years ago from my brother's house in Fallbrook, CA (Northern San Diego County). The hills down there are very different from ours as theirs is almost a desert climate. I've photographed our own hills so many times I decided to take a few liberties today. I did alter the original quite a bit today.

We have had beautiful weather today. The temperature reached 70ºF today. I am missing out in the walking department because, although Ozzie is taking much shorter walks, it takes him just about as long! This morning we met one of the neighbors who bought a house up the hill from us after he and his wife lost their house in the Tubbs fire, as did their neighbors who moved in across the road. 

Our local paper does a recap of reconstruction progress once a year or so. The most recent edition said that less than half the houses in the (once) upscale Fountaingrove area are being rebuilt or even in the pipeline as of a couple of months ago. They likened it to the area of the Berkeley hills above where we lived near the Claremont Hotel, although the main problem I remember there was the fact that the roads were little more than developers' tracks. There was a lot of talk about fixing them before allowing people to rebuild, but that didn't happen. Thirty years on, I suspect there are very few empty lots in the Berkeley hills...

But times have changed, and the threat of fire looms more prominently in people's consciousness now.The Berkeley Hills and Fountaingrove have both suffered catastrophic fires in the past, but they seem to be getting more frequent and more catastrophic now....We're all grappling with the almost incomprehensible issues of climate change, terrain, location and development that factor into where we live....