Cherry Picker...

...not picking cherries. They seemed to be stringing cable, slowly driving down the street with the guy in the bucket feeding out the cable from a big spool in the back of the truck.

Thanks to all the good thoughts and good wishes from many Blippers, and plenty of wine, we survived the night and actually slept for some of it. The winds gusted up to 80mph at the top of Mt St Helena but were considerably less here. The power shutoff lasts for another 24 hours

There is now a deep layer of fried leaves from the oak trees overlaying the ashes and soot outside and a new layer of ashes and soot on everything inside the house. It’s probably just as well that the deep cleaning and power washing were delayed a bit. The Merry Maids are coming to clean the house on Wednesday.

I talked to Tom the Serv- Pro guy about power washing the outside of the house, the garage and all the decking and cement walkways. He sent me a revised estimate, I approved it and someone is supposed to call me to set up a day. There are a lot of moving parts to this operation and it probably would have been better to do the outside before the inside, but we’ll just have to make everyone leave their shoes outside until it stops raining ashes and starts raining rain....

While I organized that, John talked to someone at AT&T and said that if we didn’t have a working system by Friday we were going to switch to their rival, Comcast. We’ve already switched from Comcast to AT&T. The Comcast cable from the pole to our house was lying on the ground where it stayed no matter how many times we reported it. It’s still on the ground but thoroughly burned. I think John senses and argument over who pays to replace it....AT&T is sending a technician tomorrow morning at 8....we’ve heard that one before. So have two of our neighbors

Work is going on on the fence...a massive job not made any easier by the fact that most of it is on a steep hill it the fact that they have to use a jack hammer to dig the post holes. Gustavo and his mate work so hard, and today had to carry water from the hot tub in buckets in order to mix the concrete. Because the power is off. They also carried away a lot of burnt fence posts and were going to leave with hands as black as if they had been playing in a coal cellar! I told them they could wash their hands with water from the hot tub too. No wonder they always wear black! They ought to wear gloves....I’d make them cookies If I had a way to bake them....