Wicked

The Slug misbehaved quite badly all night. I'm sure he is envious of my ability to get up and walk around, and to go outdoors to enjoy the coolness. You hear that, Sluggo? It's cool outside, and I get to go there! No, I shouldn't gloat. It will only make him more resentful and malicious.

With the arrival of first light this morning, I was able to see that a fine haze had gathered once again. It has already withdrawn. It is a rare atmospheric condition in these parts. I remember many such hazy mornings in Los Angeles, but these recent occurrences are the first times I've seen it here in years. On first noticing it today, I thought there might be a fire nearby, but the air carries no scent of combustion. It might do so soon enough, though. An early fire season is expected this year, due to the uncommonly dry spring. The fact that last year the area was almost free of wildfires means that there is even more accumulated fuel. At least if we are forced to evacuate this year, I have only one cat to deal with. Getting the cats together and into the car has always been the thing that worried me most. Sluggo, of course, can stay behind. That would be my compensation for the house having burned.

Hotter today, hotter still tomorrow. Doesn't look promising.

Day Shot to Hell

Mom's TV quit working, so we had to go buy a new one. Aside from small appliance stores which invariably charge the list price for everything, the only place in this town that sells full-sized television sets is K-Mart, which had nothing appropriate. We ended up going all the way to Chico, where (after hunting in several stores) I found a 20' Panasonic on closeout at Circuit City. I had never been there before, and feared that it might be like Best Buy, the noisy, badly-lighted, poorly-staffed, hyper-air-conditioned place where I bought Sluggo's monitor. (Best Buy reminds me of nothing so much as a very lame night club patronized by masses of dorky college boys and a handful of high school girls who come to laugh at them.) But Circuit City turned out to be much more pleasant, as though it had actually been designed as a retail store where people actually bought things rather than just hanging out, sampling video games and hoping to get lucky.

Anyway, the whole adventure, from making the arrangements to go to getting the machine set up and running took about four hours. Not that I could have been doing anything else of importance all that time. It was way too hot for Sluggo today, anyway. It was even hotter in Chico that it was here, and the trip down the Skyway revealed the valley filled with haze. Sutter Buttes were barely visible. A darker streak of haze rose at an angle from Chico itself -- the town's pollution drifting on the afternoon breeze. A much larger and darker patch in the south marked the edge of a smog cloud approaching from Sacramento. I'll probably have bad dreams about it.

Someday soon, I'll have to venture back to Chico to hunt for Sluggo's replacement. I'm not looking forward to it. I've noticed the mouse getting wonky in recent days. Crap. Everything in this house is falling apart.