Flower Friday : : Volunteers

I have been watching for awhile now as the neighbors' dirt pile bloomed with sunflowers.I don't think their contractor knows what he is going to do with this dirt, and who knows what the contractor on the other side is doing, but the sunflowers cheer things up. We have stopped putting sunflower seeds in our bird feeders in favor of a shelled version and less mess underneath to attract the vermin. 

The ground squirrels are getting quite bold and are eating plants almost as fast as we can plant them. I'm using the royal 'we' in this case since I've had very little to do with the planting, just the complaining...

Although he is very good at navigating around, hunting ground squirrels doesn't seem to be in Spike's bag of tricks. We took him to Spring Lake this morning and walked right through the area the ground squirrels have made their own for as  long as we have been going there. it is covered with big rocks and riddled with holes, entrances to their burrows under the boulders. Spike showed no interest....

Los Alamos Road  runs above our field all the way up the mountain behind us to Hood Mountain Regional Park. There are were scattered homes and ranches that used it for access. The park was closed when we first moved here because the road, which is very windy, narrow and exposed at the top, had washed out in a flood. The Nun's Fire of 2017 caused some damage in the regional park but burned largely in the Sugarloaf Ridge State Park which adjoins it and is accessed by a different road.  In 2020, Los Alamos was ground zero for the Glass fire which destroyed our neighbors' houses and almost everything above us. That's why I was a bit mystified by the sign* which appeared near our street after they began repaving Los Alamos again.  The fires of 2017 did enormous damage in other parts of Santa Rosa but left our neighborhood intact.  PG&E was found liable and I suspect it is the reparations they paid the city that are being used for this road work. Even though the Glass fire did far more damage in this area, as far as we know, no liability for it has resulted from investigations. 

The saga of the ongoing battles with PG&E and their responsibility for so much fire damage is long and frustrating for people whose homes were destroyed in the 2017 fire. Many of them still haven't received compensation. PG&E's fire liability is so enormous that many wonder how they will ever compensate the people most hurt by their negligence. It does make me wonder why the county is using the money to repave a road that doesn't appear to need it....