Toad in the Hole

In Other News

We’re live.

Guess we’d better get those biz cards and oh yeah, license now.

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It Ain’t Perfect

But at least it’s danceable. This is a major improvement over most forms of political campaigning.

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I Can’t Not

All kinds of news lately, much of it bad. (We’re in OK health and nobody’s died and things look bleak mostly on the employment front, which is as bad as it needs to get but hey, nobody’s dead lately. )

But here, anyway:

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Weekend Weather Report

We ran into some California summer weather on the way home from visiting some gardens in Sonoma County on Sunday.

First “Uh-oh” when Petaluma’s main drag turned to aim us at this vista:

In some places and conditions this might have been a fogbank, but no: smoke. Very white smoke, so probably only a grass fire so far. Therre was a fogbank at the coast all day, and it produced some serious wind as it drew inland in the evening; this of course moved the fire relatively fast.

Traffic was slow going past it, but at least the highway was upwind so the smoke blew the other way.

When we passed the flame front, the sound was almost liquid, if a bit more crisp, like shallow water flowing over an edge.

This was such an insignificant fire it barely rated a mention in the news; KTVU had some footage so that got played, buy the real news was a new fire up near Yosemite. Here, grass got burned, the oaks in the fields were probably OK, and someone lost “a couple of outbuildings” but not the main house. Nesting season is over for most critters, so I doubt there were many casualties. I could have outrun the flame front myself without breaking a sweat, and most of the animal inhabitants of the grass can be assumed to be faster than I am. We saw a bunch of horses clustered uphill, but the fire was nowhere near them and was moving the other way.

The grass that burned was mostly a species that was introduced because livestock relish it; somebody lost a month’s fodder for their (probably dairy) cattle, in what’s already a bad year for most of us.

These photos show a bit more detail when viewed large.

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Bite Now Approaching Bark

High point of the day, in its own way:

Dental assistant: “Oh man, this is getting too much like auto mechanics,” as she handed Mark the dentist something or other to cope with an assemblage of teeny screws, wrenches, screwdrivers (offset?), and other machined steel parts, and then something very like a grease gun which contained a substance more like caulk. The whole process did resemble what Gail the Mechanic Goddess does to our Toyota, in fact. Everything fits together just so; everything’s designed to work smoothly for a long time under predictable stresses; everything’s disassemble-able and replaceable. Plus, shiny tools! At the end of it I had not one but two new teeth. One is the finished implant that’s been in process for most of the last year, to replace the molar I broke clenching my teeth when my sister died.

I think I just answered part of my internal question about why Jeannie and the unfinished obligation I have to write about what happened to her has been preying on my mind all month. Only part of it, though, because apparently I’m not the only one of us in this stunned, enervated state of mind.

The other tooth isn’t quite all there yet but I have a temporary crown directly upstairs from the new implant. This is wider than the tooth it crowns because it also has to replace one that’s been missing for years. The crown had to get done anyway because the tooth there had lengthened into the gap now filled by the implant. If you can follow that, you’re more coherent than I am just now. What I like about this is that it’s rather an artistic solution to a sort of engineering problem.

I do appreciate elegance, particularly when it’s in a matter so close to my, well, not heart exactly. Still, one of the bits that I use a lot.

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