The Family Christmas Letter, 2017

Welcome again to my annual (ha!) Family Christmas Letter, your best way of keeping up with us, short of any other means at all.  As with previous year, we'll take it person by person, but begin now with a quick summary of the last 12 months:  WTF?

TALIA:

Talia joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater where she premiered "Dances-with-Tents," for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not really, but almost as improbably she took a contract with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she encountered software that actually discourages you from working too hard (this explains why visa processes take as long as they do, were you wondering). In spare moments, Talia made VW buy back our cheatermobile, got the whole family to be strictly vegetarian for a week, and more than once slept in the barn.

GIDEON:

Yes, well, that happened, nor was this day, camping near Bodega Bay, the only such. As Gideon's pants attest, he continues to live life to the fullest, and then some. A second grader, he is knife self-certified and uses the word "hypocrite" correctly in conversation with my mother. When not disrespecting his elders, Gideon likes to ignore them. He's friends with a fish, a remarkably good rock climber (Gideon, not the fish), and wears glasses despite having perfect vision. Make of it what you will.

FELIX:

Felix, now in 5th grade, has discovered role playing games (shown here in character as a twelfth-level bouquet). This means he's happily entertained for a couple of hours each Friday night, and the rest of us get to hear about it in excruciating detail for twenty or thirty hours thereafter. A star student during the week, he continues to bring home worksheets with one, two, or even three gold stars on them. Having not paid much attention to his sports doings, I was surprised to find myself watching his team in finals, from which they emerged Champions of the World (or the part of it that calls the sport "soccer" anyway). Even more thrilling, he stood up on a surfboard for several seconds a couple of months ago.

ALEC:

This year Alec just gave up and let himself sink into it without further struggle. It's a relief. When not enmired, Alec is busy hunting pirates on the virtual seas and making infrastructure uncomfortable. For some reason he found himself floating down rivers repeatedly this year, which is a nice break from struggling against the tide.

THE HOUSE:

Speaking of sinking, our aged property likewise reached new depths, from which we are still trying to extricate it. Shown here, Talia attempting to levitate new drywall into place, just one of the many incidents that finally convinced us to get a roof. Also on our To Do list: doors, windows, insulation, and right angles. But first we must save the barn and the land upon which it sits from washing away downstream--there is a limit to how many rivers I wish to float down.

THE VACATIONS:

Faithful as always to the Christmas letter tradition, some pictures from this year's travel, of which there was a great deal. More to come in 2018, too. A crazy year for we inhabitants of planet Earth, but a wonderful one for us and, we hope, for you as well.

Hamual

Every year they get bigger, the hams and the boys alike.

The best in town

It's been a while since my family has won a "best in Fairfax" award (2010 Halloween "Best Family" to be exact), but the combination of Talia and her skills plus Gideon and his cute is still unbeatable. Go team!

Ash

A colleague of mine lives in Santa Rosa, or did before the fires came (that's his neighborhood, just chimneys and ash now, above). Now he, his wife, and two baby girls are in a rental they were lucky to get in another town in Marin, happy to be alive, but faced with the colossal task of rebuilding their lives. One of the many challenges they face is documenting their insurance claim, and one of the ways you do that, it seems, is to sift through the wreckage for evidence of the possessions that were destroyed. That's something I can do as well as the next person, so I joined him and a few others at his former house last weekend.

The destruction in the area is unbelievable, as these photos attest:

But that's just the economic destruction--houses, vineyards, orchards. There is the social damage--Santa Rosa alone has lost something like 5% of all its housing, and that in primarily (though by no means exclusively) lower income neighborhoods that will never reform as they were. Then there's the impact on the watershed of the heavy metals and other toxins created and released in the fire; the rains which will bring those pollutants into the waterways are just beginning and the impact is much feared. We wore our N95 masks and gloves for work in the ash--a full Tyvek suit would have been even better--and I was there for only a few hours, but the crews and homeowners who face weeks and months of work in these places will surely suffer for it.

And the work, what a heartbreak it is. There's no question of salvaging anything, all you can do is look for fragments of metal or ceramic--absolutely nothing else has survived--in the hopes that it will provide evidence of what once was. Here's an example, see if you can guess what this is:

The answer, believe it or not, is "a motorcycle." And most of what you see there is actually roofing tiles. When the hammer of the gods falls, it comes down hard.

Fire!

This is the multi-day story of how we reacted to the recent wildfire disasters in the North Bay. Let's start with Thursday, 12 October 2017:

Live Fire Web App (pjdohertygis), Sonoma and Napa County fires, 12 October 2017

As this map shows, large areas near our home (which is just south of the bottom of the map) are on fire. These fires, which started last Sunday during a windstorm, are by no means under control, nor are they the only fires in the region. The winds have recently picked up again, and with fire fighting personnel already stretched to their limits we are taking the current "red flag warning" very seriously. Should fires start in Marin itself, we were prepared to decamp for Oakland where a large, empty house always awaits us. We are in that regard and many others much luckier than most of our neighbors to the north.

What we all share, however, is the air. Fires of this size spread a haze of particulate pollution across a wide area (here's one animation of that) and according to my BreezoMeter app the air where I live has been not recommended for breathing for days now. Moving to Oakland will not solve that problem, so for the weekend we're going further afield, to the aptly named "Fire Escape Cabin" near Yosemite.

And what if the fires do come? As I said, we would leave and have our bug-out bags packed accordingly. The packing of those bags, that is to say the selection of the few items you'd really want to take with you, is an interesting exercise. There's hardly a thing here we would be unable to replace or, if irreplaceable, we would actually miss. A few pieces of art (we won't transport those, they're as likely to be damaged in the rush as they are to be burnt if it comes to that), my digital data (which is backed up remotely and locally in a variety of ways), my not-yet-digitized data (the total destruction of which would be a relief to me as, I suspect, to most of us). Lubbuh is in the bag and our passports and permanent records live in a little metal box, ready to travel. Basic emergency supplies are stored in the car on a full-time basis. Let's hope it never comes to that, but if it ever does, I think we're ready.

Friday, 13 October:

Yosemite is amazing, a great inspiration, but, as the photo shows, even here the air ain't great. This is not due to the fires we've fled but rather to issues that Yosemite routinely faces (Central Valley agricultural pollution, smog from cities to the West).

Saturday, 14 October:

Whatever the air, evidence of fire on the ground is everywhere. Yosemite, as much as any part of California, has suffered from drought and drought's BFF, wildfire.

Sunday 15 October:

The smoke from the North Bay has now caught up to us, and air quality where we are (in the mountains at the top of the poisonous peach area, below) is by some measurements--wood smoke--as bad as where we were. There's no way to know, but I'm hoping that at least in other respects--burning insulation, say--it's not quite as bad.

And soon it will be much worse:  Monday night the wind is predicted to move the smoke away from Marin and to the west, so it's time to get back to the ocean side of those fires.

Monday, 16 October:

Back in the Bay Area. The fires are largely contained, some of the evacuation orders have been lifted, but the air is still bad and, for those returning to the burned zones, the ground is worse. Santa Rosa has reportedly lost 5% of its housing stock, and this in an already overheated, so to speak, market. I don't think this disaster is of unprecedented magnitude, but it's definitely up there.

Still, we have escaped unscathed and, though the fire season is not yet over nor these fires yet out, it's time for us to go back to worrying about our other great enemy, flood. More about that another time, and in the meanwhile, some pictures from Yosemite.