Fried EGG?

As I heard of the California fires, I assumed they were one valley over from EGG.  But yesterday I was on the Wundermap @ Weather Underground to check the radar and I noticed a tab for active fires.  I checked out Santa Rosa and the fires are just across the valley from EGG.  Hope all is going well for you, EGG, It sounds like you will have all the work you will ever need well into your 90's.

GOD Bless EGG and all his loved ones.

And he replies as I'm typing the above and the date stamp finally sinks in.... It's the 15th on my side of the country.  LOL

Glad to see you're alive my friend.

Egg and I have talked and texted since the morning it started, but I haven't had a reply since my first message this morning at 7:41, so Beth and I are pretty concerned.  Hoping and praying it's just cell towers burned out or dead cell phone batteries and no power to charge them.

From an email I recently sent an old friend of mine in Seattle:

We just returned from Petaluma where we had dinner with Kate and Mike, Sarah, Jon and Alex, and Uncle Steve.  Precious family get-together.  Jimalee gave a short toast emphasizing how short life is and how precious family gatherings are, regardless of the circumstances.  She's always had her priorities straight except when she tells me to comb my hair.

Sarah visibly relaxed and everyone was well fed with a hot meal done with Katherine's usual panache, and we all lapsed into non-fire discourse, a pleasant escape from the last few days' obsession.  You asked about Alex.  He was displaced for most of a year during the house remodel and though he held up pretty well, he greatly prefers Home to the friends' place which they called "our adventure home."  He got pretty tired of adventure homes.  He has a hard time when things don't work, when cars won't start, when things are broken, etc. but he has been holding up ok this week. Still, he's only six and he was restless on the couch in the middle of a million fragile objects and Sarah was getting frustrated with him and Kate was getting a little nervous.  Somebody thought it would be a good idea for me to take him outside and I agreed, so he and I went out and he ran some timed races, getting his times down as low as he could and proud of it.  Then we played a little tag til I was worn out.  He picked up a stick and asked if it was bamboo because it looked like bamboo.  I told him it was definitely bamboo.  He said I had a choice; we could play bamboo tag (where you tag each other with the pointy end of a bamboo stick) or regular tag.  Naturally I chose regular tag.

Then we watched large billows of smoke rising from the distant ridge.  He asked me if it was close and I said that it wasn't.  He asked if we should go in and tell everybody about the smoke, and I said, "No, they don't want to hear about smoke.  They've been thinking about fires for four straight days and now they are finally enjoying a peaceful evening and the last thing they want is for a couple of clown-face guys to come in and tell them about smoke.  He thought that was hilarious.  Then he looked up at me and said, holding his pants absently, "When some people get scared sometimes they just pee in their pants.  I agreed and asked him if he needed to pee.  He said no, but some people might pee if they got scared.  Turns out he didn't actually need to pee and I told him about the time my jet almost went down over the Indian Ocean and how I thought I was going to pee in my pants (he laughed out loud) and then thought I was going to poop in my pants (he laughed louder) and then thought I was going to throw up.  He laughed again and when I told him I held it all together but went through the whole thing about three more times he thought that was really amazing.

Then he asked me how close the smoke was.  I told him that it wasn't close.  But he thought it would be good if I put him on my shoulders so he could see better.  I put him on my shoulders and he said, "You're right; that's not close."  Then he asked if we should  tell everybody about the smoke so I said, "No, I really don't think we need to."  He thought about it a minute and then he started laughing and said, "Yeah, they don't want a couple of clowns telling them about smoke right now after they have been worrying for four days, do they?"  I said, "No, they're enjoying themselves right now. We don't need to say anything."  And he said, "l think we should probably go in though."

We went in and a good time was had by all.  But I noticed that he did go into the back bedroom briefly with Jon and I would assume he mentioned the smoke to his dad, discreetly, and may even have used the bathroom.  That's how he's doing.  On the couch again, just the two of us, he grilled me about numbers.  20 times 50, 100 times 100, 2 times infinity, infinity minus infinity, 29 times 29.  I said, "It must be hard for you hoping to prove how dumb I am and me proving I'm not as dumb as you were hoping.  He laughed.  Back to the numbers again.  More about infinity.  Then he slipped in a little what's two plus two?  Followed by what's one butt-crack plus one butt-crack?  Then we worked on a book of mazes he just got.  Lastly he had to put on his pajamas and go to bed (although he didn't believe it was really bedtime yet)  and he gave everybody a hug and off he went.  Love that little guy.  That's how I'm doing.  Plus, I would like all these fires to burn out, & just about right now would be just about perfect.

My daughter had to flee with her family with fires burning on both sides of the road.  She's still rattled.  Her house which we remodeled last year is still standing, so far, but elsewhere a seventy five square Ambassador job with 750 ft of gutter I did some years ago is nothing but an ash field with two melted cars in the driveway.  A young builder I know got trapped on 101 at just the wrong time and had to power through the firestorm to get out.  Many people I know have lost their homes, both rich and poor.  Many roofs I've done are just flat gone.  I worked Thursday alone, Friday alone, and six hours today, alone, because the guys who usually assist me are otherwise occupied with their own pressing matters and I'll tell you it's very hard to work in all the smoke.  We have refugees living with us right now.  Brewing a lot of coffee and washing a lot of clothes.  Very surprised there aren't more dead, but the count keeps rising.  Nobody was ready for this.  I had a morbid premonition before it happened.  There was a water-less gradient that prompted a forecast of extreme wind in the Northbay hills and I had been driving back and forth for a week between Napa and Sonoma counties doing a major repair on a tile roof.  For a variety of reasons I had taken every possible route there and back and seen just how dry everything was and when I heard the forecast I said, "We better hope we don't get a fire in that."  My daughter called and said the trees were bending so far back and forth that they were sending showers of sparks from the power lines across the street.  Usually it's west county that gets hammered, but this time around we have had to bear witness to other people's distress and just praying it doesn't get a foothold over here.  Natural disasters are terrifying.  I'm too hard-boiled to go running around in circles, but it's been challenging trying to wrap my mind around just how bad it is.