Okay, enough about the wildfires. Though many are still burning, there's only so much I can report on it. And it's Halloween, so distractions are in order.

But this is not the Halloween I intended. Yesterday it happened. A 4 second lapse of concentration added a full day of work and hundreds of miles to the odometer on the truck, and so today will be spent rectifying the error. It happens every now and then: a bad cut. I make thousands of cuts, day in, day out, so sooner or later it all catches up with me. Unfortunately it's all aluminum -shaped, formed, and (mostly) pre-cut at the factory. I can't just pull out another piece of wood, so I have to drive hundreds of miles out to BFAfghanistan to get a replacement part. It doesn't help that the job site is in BFChulaVista, in the opposite direction. Turns out there were a few other parts missing, so whatever. Went with the original manufacturer this time, too. Doesn't seem to matter. Blame the witches.

Let's just hope that a 4 second lapse of concentration some day won't relieve me of my left thumb. (At least not before I get disability insurance.)

This is all unfortunate, too, as I was really looking forward to carving pumpkins and seeing the Little Ditchman running around all day in her award-winning costume display. I'll make it in time for tonight's little party, assuming the demons on my shoulder don't leap off and confound the flow of my work day. Everyone's invited over tonight! This means you! Especially if you are MALE, as this will be another hen fest of dynamic proportions. My costume was going to be The Last Man In The World, but on second thought...

Anyway, Happy Halloween. This is a great American holiday. Dress like an idiot and they give you candy. How can you beat that?

WILDFIRE RECOVERY 2007! - Day 9

Just last night, the fires closest to my house were 100 percent contained, but people are still discussing The Fires. It's slowing down somewhat, like the plitta-plitta of sprinkling rain after a nasty thunderstorm, but you still see it mentioned at the back-end of the news. I pulled off the freeway on my way to work yesterday and thought I'd drive through a neighborhood where one of my old customers lives. I'd heard the street was hit pretty hard and thought maybe I could offer some help or just see what I could see.

Incredible. On TV you see the flames on a house or on a hillside, firefighters running every which way, water streaming through the air, helicopters overhead -but it's like witnessing a murder through a cardboard toilet paper tube. In real life, it floors you. This is a neighborhood. It's not ranch homes built up against some brush-filled tinder box in a gully. This is suburban sprawl, and the fires took it.

The neighborhood had police tape at every entrance and a sign that read sternly STREET CLOSED - RESIDENTS ONLY - BY ORDER OF THE POLICE DEPARTMENT and cops were patrolling up and down, looking for looters, gougers and lookyloos I presume. I even saw a large tan hummer with helmeted National guard in it. I drove in anyway, and later felt guilty about it.

It made me feel sick to drive through. At first, I thought I had made a wrong turn, as I was just driving down a street with houses on both sides of me, and then I came around a turn and BLAM no house there -BLAM -BLAM no house there or there. And then BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM -all just wiped off their slabs, only ashes left behind. It was shocking.


In the picture above is the one house on that street that survived. This street was like any street in the suburbs, your street. It was house after house after house. They weren't wealthy mansions, they weren't new homes, and they weren't out in the countryside or near the beach. They were a mile or two from the freeway off-ramp. There's a church on the corner and a grocery store near that. The one home standing in the picture, that's my customer's home. The house to the right of them burned to the ground.


The house to the left of them burned to the ground. The trees behind them caught fire. The fire was unapologetically indiscriminate. There is no sanity in it. All they lost was their fence.


Most of the fences caught fire and burned. I could wax on this metaphor all day long. You're driving around and you don't notice it at first, something seems amiss, then you see half of one and you realize no fences. It was just the thing between us that caught fire and then was gone, as everyone pulled together to kill the animal that came to destroy their homes.

Seeing these people milling through what was left of their everything was a violation, and they looked vulnerable. That "vulnerability" defines the neighborhood for the time being, but there was hope to be seen. On street-corner after street-corner there were hand-painted signs that read "Thank You San Diego!" and "We love you!" and "God Bless the SDFD!" -it was a stirring sight, but a burned out car in a driveway with no house behind it is an entirely demoralizing sight, and there was one after another. Some cars lost it in the street, and you had to drive around them. I saw more than a couple families sitting on their concrete foundations, just doing normal stuff -chatting, reading. One family had set up a burned table and brought a few patio chairs. They sat there in the middle of it all, having lunch. For a second, I thought, What are these people doing? And then it occurred to me: they have nowhere else to go.

That's when I felt like throwing up.

I couldn't help but think about the old wood patio cover that I had torn down from this house. It's possible that it saved the place, though no one can say for sure. We replaced it with a shiny white aluminum one. It's still standing.


I never considered the seriousness of the "fireproof" concept before. We mention it all the time when we're selling the things. A wood patio cover up against your home is beautiful, useful, and convenient, until the day the fire comes through, and then it's as good as a stack of firewood on your patio -fuel, leaning against the house. Like this guy:


He was lucky.

Perhaps the business I'm in really is a good service. Perhaps. Perhaps there will be more business in the coming spring. I think of all the contractors that will come streaming into this town in the coming months, and it makes me sick again. It's not fair. Little in this life is fair, and there's only one thing you can do about it: be fair.

There's no room for survivor's guilt, but there's plenty of room for fairness.

WILDFIRE CLEAN-UP 2007! - Day 8

It's that time of year again.

When you have your own business, there's always a "slow period" and a "fast period". This isn't the fast period. Mrs. Ditchman delineated on the office dry-erase board all the jobs we have left on the calendar for 2007, and the sight of it begets a certain amount of consternation when you consider, among other things, the costs of the impending Christmas gifts. It's also that time of year when I take a look around the abode and notice all of the unfinished projects started last spring. This impels me to the kitchen chalkboard, where I likewise delineate them accordingly. Let's see, there's the custom office filing cabinets, the kitchen closet shelves, the office shelves, the sound system shelves/cabinet, the front landscaping and whole-property sprinkler repair/replacement, back fence, minor painting touch-up and hinge replacement, and then there's the various ancillary undone tasks: old photo scanning, annual videos to edit, boat-seat repair, etc.

So what did I choose to do with my weekend? Build a pond! Yes, and who doesn't want a nice pond in their backyard, eh? People of Oceanside: Behold! I give you The Eastview Court Water Feature:



Okay, so it's not the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Notice Inspector Ditchman standing there, writing me up for not pulling permits. I've always wanted a pond, and since there's no power way out there behind the house, I figured a simple depression in the yard filled with standing water would suffice for a few water lilies. And lest you think this is to become an algae prone mosquito spawning ground, I'll advise at this juncture that it is my intent to have enough plant life to create a bio-cycle as well as certain indigenous mosquito-eating fish. Anyway, it's all part of my vast plan to have a nice backyard that I can sit and look at. Something to take my mind off the aluminum-poisoning that is eating away at my brain.

Saturday was filled with parties that happened, parties that didn't happen, parties that almost happened, and parties that almost didn't happen. It was the day of the OAW (Oceanside Ale Works) Oktoberfest, and since we were invited to a neighborhood birthday party, I decided I would have to let this one slip on by until next year. Imagine my excitement when we walked down to the neighbor's and found it empty with a note on the door! Imagine my dismay when the note explained that the party had been moved to a local McDonald's. Imagine my greater dismay when we arrived at McDonald's and found that all of the neighborhood dads were at the Oktoberfest. Oh well. So it was me at the henfest, pecking away at a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, which I hadn't had in a decade. When the burger grease dripped down my arm to my elbow, I recalled why. The other moms were surprised to learn that the Little Ditchman had never been to McDonald's. "No, mam. And neither have we been here in years." This raised eyebrows. "We don't eat a lot of fast food. Actually, we don't ever eat fast food. But I'll have In-and-Out every couple of weeks or so." There was one response: "You cook for every meal?"

I guess we're old-fashioned traditionalists that way. I might add that the culinary acumen necessary to make a bagel and cream cheese, macaroni, and PB&J is extensive.

Then it was on to the Halloween costume party at the WeeStart. And, no, WeeStart is not the potty-training educational centre you might imagine it is. Rather, it is the pre-pre-school that Mrs. Ditchman takes the little one to a few times a week. I've been once or twice, and it is an impressive operation. There are colorful climbing toys everywhere (surrounded by all the necessary padding) and music going and bubbles blowing and friendly faces. The girl who runs it has a terrific amount of energy and enthusiasm and we were glad to hear that her house did not burn down in the recent Fallbrook fire. My favorite thing about WeeStart? Everything in the place is rearranged on a daily basis. The one and two year-olds and my ADD appreciate it.

The costume party brought out about fifty folks, or so, including several dads who mostly stood idly by in the lobby, talking on their cel phones. There were a few cute costumes, too, as you cannot resist a two-year old in an elephant costume or a superman costume. My Little Ditchman won First Place, (actually it was the only place) in the costume contest and wearing a costume she chose all by herself -thereby ensuring her place as a future youth camp director. Prize: a free month of WeeStart! Between the cost of the costume, the party itself, and other Halloween amenities, it was a wash. Oh, whatever was she dressed as, that garnered such accolades? Well, you'll just have to come over on Halloween if you want to find out! (Or just read the Mundane Details. Sooner or later, all will be revealed over there, I'm sure. I don't want to steal the thunder of the Details.)

And we had some rain this weekend! It was just a bit, but it was enough humidity to assist the firemen. Most of the fires are on their way to containment, but it was reported that the Devil's Winds were going to return sometime this week, unfortunately. The rain seemed a seriously answered prayer, as we haven't had rain around here in, I don't know -months, years, and it was odd to see it arrive just a few days after some of the biggest fires in the county's history. I spent all Saturday morning hosing down the house. Most of the smoke has blown off our hill here in Oceanside, but it still reeks like a motel ashtray. I suggest we keep the prayers moving, as no one wants to see it happen all over again. Last Friday I had a few deliveries and basically ended up touring the vast southland, seeing all the locales of recent charring acclaim. It was brutal in some areas, amazingly close in others. It was similar to standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: You can't take a picture of it. You just stand there and shake your head.

But remember: It's gonna be a great week! (Better than last!)

WILDFIRE REBUILDING 2007! - Day 5

The sky was a more normal shade of pale this morning. Out the window it looked breatheable, and the sore throat seems better, too (I can swallow without wincing.) I heard more sirens in the distance again, but that might be just your ordinary, everyday emergency, and not newsworthy unless it happens to you or me.

I've spent a lot of time on this map, though it is slow to update. Zoom in and float around and it gives you a good idea of the proximity of the fires, the devastation, and the evacuation areas. (We live near the corner of Oceanside Blvd. and Melrose, if you're interested.) There's not an evacuation area anywhere near us now, thankfully, and the fire I mentioned yesterday was in the Arrowood area, which still doesn't list. So now we can move on to our regular lives, already in progress.

It's Halloweentime! (Remember?) So that means candy and costumes and parties all weekend. Today is the full moon and last night I noticed it looked blood-red, like it had been lifted straight out of Revelation 6:12. How spirited! Incidentally, the other day the sun looked black like sackcloth made of goat hair, but I felt it was inappropriate to make the allusion at the time.

Probably unconnected (though don't rule it out) the new Mac Operating System is released today! And we all know what that means: Yes, I am finally going to go out and get a new Mac! Yahoo! All right, settle down everyone, settle down... I know how excited you are for me. I think I may still be a few dollars short in my savings account but I'll figure it out with the credit cards (don't tell the Mrs.) I'm still not blown away by the new iMacs, but I'm going to consult with a few folks in the know, and then try and get the most for my money. Thank you for your support and encouragement in this transition. Sometimes these things can be difficult. If you see my wife, please pat her on the back and remind her of the commitment she made when we got married.

In other news, plane travel through Iowa is going to suck from now on, though it may make you smirk, and with all this talk of fire safety, I'm still not getting a parrot.

Tune in next week to learn such topical and interesting issues as: What The Little Ditchman Is Going To Be For Halloween! What It's Like To Build An Aluminum Patio Cover Outside In The Smog! What Beer I'm Currently Drinking!

If you are a new lurker to the site, post a comment or drop me an Email and say "sh!t howdy." Make yourself known. Welcome to the elite club of TMST readership, the most curious, clever, and culturally astute people on the World Wide Web!

Have an excellent weekend. If you're bored, go help someone hose down the ash in their yard. Take a look around the house and remind yourself that you don't need 99 percent of that crap. Sell it in the next yard sale. Make gifts for your friends and family for Christmas, and don't use so much wrapping paper. Remember the immortal words of Henry David Thoreau:

"Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify! Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose... As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."

I leave you with the Governor of California, in what I consider the shining moment of his term. (I love how he just hands the reporter her butt. I only wish the president would do this more.)



Wait... Yoga classes?

SOCAL FIRES 2007! - Day 4

From Space. That part there that is heaviest white, that's where I live. The smoke's been pretty bad.

The Intermittentnet has been down -which is unfortunate because I noticed my readership more than doubled yesterday. (Thanks for checking in!) So, sorry about the delays, but we've been on fire down here...

Well, we haven't actually been on fire, thank goodness. But, it seems things are going better. The president arrived today and everyone's talking about rebuilding, which is just swell. Senator and novelist Barbara Boxer got the jump on spreading the good feelings, as she was out yesterday promising we would rebuild. They cut away from live footage of firefighters to go to her. I kinda wish she had just gone out and stood behind those sweaty, dirty firemen who haven't slept in 48 hours and just stood there with her fist in the air chanting, "WE WILL REBUILD!" Uh, yes, we will. Excuse me politicians, can we put out the fires first? The Rice Fire (the one closest to my house) still threatens 1500 homes and is only 10 percent contained. As well, the Witch fire is only 10 percent contained and threatens another 5000 residences. Among others.

Jeebus. Over 750 square miles have burned in SoCal so far. Death toll is at seven, with seven more people dying after they were evacuated, mostly elderly. About one thousand, five hundred homes have been destroyed. Take a moment and count the homes on your street and you'll get an idea of how many that is. One third of the state's avocado crop has been decimated, so expect guacamole prices to go through the roof. And some of the fires are thought to have been arson, which makes me want to bring back Burning-At-The-Stake as a viable form of capital punishment. Let them light their own, too.

There is a general feeling of "It's over" on the news, as the newscasters end their non-stop 3 day streak and begin showing commercials, soap operas, and reality shows (which, now that I think of it, isn't that what we were watching?) But it's clearly not over. It's not over for the people who still can't get back into their neighborhoods and it's not over for the 1700 firefighters busting their humps out there in the dirt, smoke, and heat -God be with them. For some of these fires it's been estimated that the heroes will have them contained and put out by November 4th, over a week from now. So, no, it's not over and no, you can't really rebuild yet.

Yesterday my little family got sick of being cooped up and went out to see what we could see. Seemed most of Oceanside was back to normal, except for all the ash falling from the sky and that burnt red sun up there. We couldn't see any fires in the distance, due to all the smoke, but we came up one local boulevard and found the police turning every car away. We turned, and then took a quick right into a neighborhood just a few miles from our house, and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of some of the things we'd seen on TV...

Everyone was outside standing in the street looking off to the horizon. The helicopters were especially close, with very large bags of water dangling from them, and moving to and fro. A man was hosing down his roof, and a few elderly were being helped into minivans. We saw people loading stuff into trucks...

In the near distance was a fire that wasn't on any map. It seemed an event of spontaneous combustion, and yet one people were prepared for. It was immediately being discussed on the radio, and it looked to me like a lot of firefighters just dropped what they were doing to go over and put out this small one, which was so near a heavily populated area. Helicopters just appeared, disappeared, and reappeared as they dumped water on the blaze. I'd heard that they were dunking their bags into local swimming pools to collect water, and I thought that ought to be quite a sight. Eventually the local blaze was put out, and I guess all the officials went back to fighting the main fires, but it still isn't listed on any maps. It didn't have a name and it came out of nowhere, but it made us all jump a bit. I mean, this was a nicely manicured neighborhood with lots of new homes close together -we even had an appointment with someone over there next week. Anyway, it was a place you'd never expect a catastrophe, and well, here it was a few blocks away.

The weather has been a lot better for fighting fires. The Santa Anas have died down, and the cool air over the ocean is returning inland. I'm still sick with this nasty sore throat, and the smoke doesn't help it in the least. It's an odd thing to be sick through a citywide crisis. There's a fog that surrounds you when you're sick -you lose touch with necessary parts of the routine, you can't sleep, it's hard to be in a good mood... Add that to a major week long historic news event and it feels like you're running in reverse on a carousel, lights blinking, calliope music thumping, and you're looking for a horse.

I woke up this morning to sirens in the distance, which is the first time it's actually happened all week. It scared me for a moment, but everything was fine. I'm not sure what it was, but I looked out the window and noticed that the wind had died down and the sky had turned from the charred brown of burning fires to the morose gray of smoldering ones and my heart was a little less heavy. We can't really imagine what it would be like to lose everything in a fire, but one San Diegan on TV was standing on the concrete slab of his burned out house, and looking around he noted, "You just move forward, clutter-free."

Imagine the worst thing that ever happened to you. Now re-imagine it as a Liberation.

WILDFIRES 2007! - Day 3

There was no orange glow on the horizon last night. I would say that that is a breath of fresh air, but the statement would conflict with its own literal sense, in that there hasn't been one in a few days. Puffs of ash swirl about your feet when you walk down the sidewalk, open the car door, and so forth. The red eye at the center of the solar system winked shut last night, and across the sky another red eye opened: the moon. (Wish I could get a picture of it.)

And I can't tell if this scratchy throat of mine is from the smoke or the virus, but that's life in SoCal for now. (I'm not looking forward to working in it.)

The ash-laden sky cast an erie pall throughout the house all afternoon, as if the neighborhood was wearing an old pair of Ray-Bans, or something. Everything was just a brownish-yellow -jaundiced- and you didn't notice it until a white page came up on the computer screen or TV and you'd think, whoa! I forgot about white, for a moment!

We stayed inside most of the day. There was a sad exchange when the Little Ditchman wanted to go outside. "Owtsite! Owtsite! Owtsite!" and it just breaks your heart that you can't explain why you have to say 'No' -one of those parenting moments where you realize how God must feel. And then she started begging determinedly for the beach or the pool, which garnered the same negatory response, to her chagrin. Not one to give up easily, she left the room and came back with her bathing suit, which she then donned, if only to spite us. Sorry kid. You're cute, though. (Another one of those Godly thoughts.)

My daughter notwithstanding, I've really been impressed with how the county/city has been handling this crisis with the fires. Sorry to bring up a Katrina comparison again, but Southern California evacuated a half a million people in less than 48 hours! 640 square miles have burned, over 1300 homes are gone -and only one death! The National Guard has been mobilized, nearly 2000 firefighters are busting it out, and the stadium downtown not only had more volunteers than it needed, officials were turning away donations of supplies this afternoon. Why, the refugees themselves -people who had just lost everything they owned- were reported to be donating blood! Again, only 48 hours have passed. Don't wait up looking for the comparison in the evening news. Unless, of course, you want to blame the fires on global warming, at which point the ball is squarely back in Bush's court.

Speaking of the evening news, for all those people who just lost everything and then were asked by a TV reporter "How do you feel?" It's payback time:



The guy who follows him I'm not so sure about, but I don't want to be too hard on Larry Himmel. That's the most honest bit of TV reporting I've seen in years. You really feel for him. When you hear the trembling in his voice and the pauses between the words of him naming what once was, you can sense his trying to maintain self-control with all the memories whirling through his head. When he points at his hose in the driveway, there's a moment where you can tell he's thinking, "Wow. They used my hose. They saved my hose. All I have left is this hose." In an interview later, he mentioned that the previous day he had been covering folks who had lost their homes, and then went home himself that night moved by it all, sharing with his wife and teenage son how difficult it must've been for these folks to lose everything. Little did he know, tomorrow's story was him.

Sooner or later tomorrow's story is all of us, to beg profundity, but it is somehow. What goes around, comes around. And these fires, though they'll be out there fighting them for the next week or so, will be back next year or the year after. Just like the hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes. God just shakes his head. Some of them learn, some of them don't. To beg profundity.

Best not to dwell on it. I prefer, instead, to dwell on this:


(Note mismatched two-piece, an odd third piece in hand.)

FIRE WATCH 2007! - Day 2

View from our neighborhood last night:



And this morning:



The phone rang at around 5AM this morning. I bolted upright from the couch, where I'd slept with the TV on all night. I immediately smelled smoke. The phone rang again. This is it, I thought.

It was my wife's family. They were outta here. No Cautionary Evacuation Notice or anything for them, they just couldn't take the smoke anymore. My mother-in-law was actually in an Evac area, but it wasn't particularly threatened. Same for my aunt-in-law. Oceanside's still safe. We called off our appointments for the day (I'm sick anyway) and decided to get some things in order around the house, clean up a bit.

"I knew you wouldn't leave," my sister-in-law said.

"But we haven't been asked to leave yet!"

"And you're just not the type to panic like we are." Well, yes, this is true. But I went outside this morning to scope the horizon and there was nothing particularly encouraging about the sight: smoke as far as you could see in every direction, and the sun a distant red eye that you could look at directly without having to squint.

The neighborhood was covered with ash, which is disheartening when you consider what it once was: Fallbrook.

Fallbrook is the town of 30,000 to the northeast of us and it has been evacuated entirely. Hundreds of homes are gone. Some people failed to heed the Cautionary Evac notice and were stuck there, spending the night at the fire station. This is the "Rice Fire" and is the one that would threaten Oceanside if the winds whip up today and really get it going. So far, it looks like it's pretty calm out there. We'll wait and see.

We've got all of the windows closed and the air purifier on and the fan blowing the house air through the hypo-allergenic filter, so it's not too bad in here -as long as we don't open the front door. I'm not scared yet, and I think everything is going to be fine. The National Guard is out there and air support for the firefighters is being brought in today, so if the weather cooperates all will be under control. Last I heard, they were making the Rice Fire in Fallbrook a priority, so that's good for us, bad for everyone else.

Some news agencies are reporting that over a half a million people have fled burning areas in Southern California, though I think that is slightly exaggerated. They make it sound as if hoardes of humankind are on foot, running for the border with their belongings on their backs, their babies in slings, and the fire licking at their heels, but my friends the Keeners, who live in the immediate path of the oddly named "Witch Fire", just went to some friends' who lived in Hillcrest, on the other side of town. The Lindens, by the way, offered their house to us if we needed to evacuate, but they are now in the path of the "Harris Fire" -so we all have our own fire (how nice!) We couldn't get down there, anyway, as the freeways are closed.

Thankfully, with all this madness being reported, there's been only one death and less than fifty injuries (most of those the firefighters, God bless 'em.) This is no Katrina, ladies and gentlemen. San Diego knows how to handle it, they've seen fires before and already there are reports that everything is going smoother than previous emergencies. And I have to hand it to the city officials who I watched on some of the press conferences (which they are doing every few hours). These guys are being straight up and honest about everything, with quotes like, "There is no good news just yet" which I find curiously refreshing. I don't want fake blather about "time to grieve" and so forth, I want facts. And we seem to be getting them. Somehow, I don't think the president will be blamed for this one. Also, San Diego is the republican stronghold of California, so go figure.

But we're here, we're safe, and we're keeping an eye on things. It happens every year down here, folks. Why, I even predicted it in this blog last month! (see: here.) Unfortunately, some years are worse than others.