July 16, 2023

Daily Diary, Day 1050: I am making good progress on the epilogue, and have written 400 words so far this morning, I did get in a 20 minute walk yesterday afternoon. And, in addition to doing nearly two hours of doing the major weekly cleaning this morning, I will try to do 30 minutes this evening, although we will see how hot it will get, since it is definitely hotter today.

Last night, as I started to fall asleep (the windows open) I thought I smelled smoke...and I almost got up to check to make sure I didn't see any signs of fire in the canyon. I had heard on the radio at dinner time of a brush fire somewhere in the county, so it could have been that still lingering. After 3 years of drought followed by unusually rainy winter, every back yard, canyon, and empty lot n the city has more weeds and brush than we've had for years...all quickly drying out and becoming perfect tinder.

This morning I checked a link I had found last year during fire season that shows active fires in California and saw there were a bunch, still relatively small but growing, in Riverside (way to the north east of us), but nothing in San Diego county, so I was probably imagining what I smelled.

This is the downside of the lovely sunny days we are now having, even the breeze coming up the canyon can have the slightest sense of possible menace. However, this does remind me of the importance of staying in the present.

Although there is nothing wrong with checking to see if the link locating fires is still working, maybe even taking the time to create a list of what to grab to put in the car in case we need to get ready to evacuate in a hurry. Because this has happened a couple of times during past fire seasons. Thankfully, we’ve never actually had to go, because the fires nearby were stopped just in time. But we have had too many fires and I have known too many neighborhoods that have had to evacuate, for me to dismiss this as an impossibility.

But, I should take these modest preparations so that I can let go of thinking about what might happen, which ruin my enjoyment of the sun and the breeze in the present.

On a lighter note, we have been battling squirrels again, a small baby one, and larger adult. Our dog has learned the word squirrel and runs to the window next to the bird feeder when she hears us, and twice yesterday she also alerted us to them both being in the back yard. We therefore need to be careful when letting her out.

We hope her sniffing around where they have been will discourage them, but we certainly don’t want her to catch one. Yesterday I also saw a mother feeding two juveniles while going back and forth between the feeder and the bougainvillea, so we appear to be in a second round of births.

An article I read last week about taking healthy breaks from working at the computer suggested a 20-20-20 rule. Taking twenty seconds to look at an object twenty feet away every twenty minutes. This quite fits my habit of looking up and observing the birds (or looking for a squirrel) so instead of feeling like I am being too distracted while writing, I decided this was a sign of healthy living!

Some more orange and yellow flower, these daisy-type blooms always remind me of candy corn and fall.