Waiting...

Dana and Jim are waiting for a bathtub and one (of two) sink for their otherwise fully remodeled bathroom. They're coming from Europe so they are probably in the bottom of the hold of some container ship stuck in the San Francisco Bay waiting to be unloaded....The same ship that the two chairs we have been waiting for since the end of February.

We don't know a single person whose house burned down in Sept 2020 who are not waiting to start rebuilding their homes. They had to wait for the lots to be cleared, then they had to wait for the soil samples to be cleared for toxic residue, now they are waiting for soil and structural engineering reports. How can you do a report on a structure that you are not allowed to start building because you don't have a structural engineering report? Of course these engineers are backed up for unknowable amounts of time, but don't seem to have any trouble charging large sums of unanticipated money for the privilege of letting them wait.

We are also waiting for a piece of double paned glass for one of our living room windows on which the seal was failing. When the man came to install it, the class cracked while he was putting it in. It was marked tempered but clearly wasn't, so now we are all waiting for a new piece of glass to arrive.

A good friend's life is partially on hold as he waits for the results of a battery of tests which are supposed to decide the next steps in his treatment. There is not much sense of urgency about getting these tests done. We're told that there is a shortage of medical professionals here. 

All these delays are supposedly the fault of disruptions to the supply chain because of Covid and the restrictions and the resulting restrictions.

But I think that here, more than anything else, we are waiting for wildfires. There certainly is a heightened awareness of what should be done to prepare, but really, given the capriciousness of these fires many people feel that they are waiting for the inevitable, and can only hope they have prepared enough...Living here on the top of our hill with properties destroyed by fire on all sides of us, we are proof of how the best protection against fire is mostly luck. In our case, all the pieces of the puzzle were in the right place at the right time.

Todays' picture of Wildwood Mountain with its high vineyards shows both which things escaped and which things that didn't and which are now recovering. I know I've taken this picture many times before, but I am trying to document the changes. This picture was taken across a cleared lot a few blocks away. When there was a house on this lot, it was surrounded by trees. Now that the house and the trees are gone, the lot has quite a wonderful view. It just sold for $365,000, but who would buy it?