Ruins

You never know what is going to happen around here. The driveway next door is even steeper than ours and that, a very tall chimney and a lot of big plant pots are all that are  were all that left of our neighbor's home after the Glass fire. A lot of very big burned trees have already been cleared. As we were eating lunch a water truck,  just visible beyond the tree  (which is on our side of the drainage gully) a bulldozer with a bucket on the front and another big truck backed up the driveway and five or six men jumped out in hi-viz  vests and hardhats. The bulldozer driver jumped out, and put on his hazmat suit and goggles. The water truck driver jumped out and began spraying the chimney with water . The guys in the hi-viz vests did very little ...they just stood around and watched. 

It took a single perfectly aimed blow of the bucket on the front of the bulldozer to bring the entire chimney down and the bricks and mortar disappeared into the scattered rubble on the ground. They put red caution tape around the entire site and disappeared back down the driveway, stopping only once for the guy in the hazmat suit to take it off and stash it in the rubble as well. The whole thing took 15 minutes from beginning to end, which is why I missed the picture getting my camera when the chimney actually toppled.

This is the second time we have seen this operation performed. The first time was the house on the other side of us about three weeks ago. Nothing more has happened since. Apparently there is a dedicated chimney destruction crew that does nothing else.

A trip across town to the home furnishing store to return some rug samples began as a disaster because not one of the ones we liked was available in an 8'x10' size. It ended in success when I brought home a rug in a much different color which I loved, but wasn't available in an 8x10 either. I brought home the floor sample to see if it would work. Not only did it work, we liked the smaller size better. Somebody else will have to solve the mystery of why all 8'x10' rugs seem to have been discontinued....I also bought two smaller chairs in a yellow/mustard color for our living room.

Buying even something as simple as a new rug is dangerous because it tends to lead to the need to redecorate/replace everything around it. That is the concept that John just  doesn't get. I won't go into the details of how I convinced him we needed two new chairs when I had gone to look for a rug, but he just told me he was in a good mood, so the yellow must have worked. Hope he can hang on to his good mood until the chairs get here.