Tomato Sauce

Too hot to go outside so while it was still a little bit cool I made tomato sauce while John gave extra water to the flowerpots and the veggie beds, and covered all the veggies with shade cloth. The extra shows the sauce simmering in the pot on the stove.

The thermometer on our porch in the shade says it is 108ºF.  We got up this morning at 5am and closed all the windows and doors which were open all night and turned on the air conditioning. The suggestion has been made that if we MUST use the AC turn it on when we don't need it in order to keep the house cooler in the afternoon when we DO need it. This is exactly the kind of logic that the power company applies to all of its shortcomings. If their transmission lines are so poorly maintained that they might start a fire, turn the power off. If the grid is inadequate to the demand on the hottest day of the year, ask people not to put any demand on it. We should be using solar power right now,  so  I  turned on our AC. If anybody wants to know, I'll tell him it's for the old black dog....

I was struck by many conflicting headlines in the paper during the last week. On September 2nd, the headline was that the virus seemed to be easing. Yesterday, the headline warned us of the threat of a spike over the Labor Day holiday weekend and urged us to stay home and not gather in crowds. 

 Both could be true, of course, but if we just had adequate testing and contact tracing, we could much more easily isolate those who are positive and the rest of us would be able to go to the beach on a holiday and the hottest day of the year.

Instead Trump is insisting on giving tests only to those people who already have symptoms.

A week ago, an article in the paper suggested that with the mounting toll fires are taking not only on our citizens and their property, but on the insurance companies, they may just pull out of California and refuse to insure anybody who lives here. Who would want to buy, or be able to sell, a house here if they couldn't insure it?

Three days ago another story talked about how the real estate market in 
Napa and Sonoma counties is booming with Silicon Valley tech workers working from home and looking for 'more space' in which to do it. There was a story about a couple who wished to remain anonymous, who just paid $14MILLION dollars for a huge spread in Sonoma county which they planned to use while working from home, and then as a 'second home'. No wonder they wanted to remain anonymous.
 
A further story this morning said that Trump and the Republicans are trashing California as being run by 'socialist' politicians. Apparently people are believing their descriptions of violence, homelessness and mayhem in our cities and fires and disease in the outskirts while ignoring the same thing in their own cities because it's what they want to hear, not because they have ever been here. Kimberly Gullifoyle's rant at the Republican convention was apparently a good indication of how the former wife of our governor and a reasonably 'normal' person back then has become a screaming shrew after being associated with the Trump administration for a few years. She is now the girlfriend of Trump, Jr.

Governor Newsome had the right idea....

And that, in a nutshell,  is the contrast between Bidenworld and Trumpworld.