Warm weather is over

Yesterday started out nice enough - sunny and sixty something. By afternoon it had turned cold and then it started raining. We did get the deck power washed in preparation for having it sealed.

We still had crackling noises on the phone line.  This time a guy came out and said it was inside. He had to come in and check every phone and jack in the house. Disconnected the jacks we aren't using and moved some wires around. It seems like the crackling is gone or at least infrequent enough that we can live with it.

Sad for us to watch these reports of the fires in Southern California. Our friends Bill and Alice are out there now along with their daughter Sue and her husband.  They had to shut the windows in their hotel room in La Jolla because soot was getting on everything.  Bill and Alice had planned to go to Long Beach but couldn't drive North because of the smoke. Alice called Jill yesterday and said they were down at Balboa Park in San Diego and that the smoke had not reached there yet.

This morning I read that the fires were approaching Del Mar and people were being evacuated.  We heard that people in Encinitas were leaving their homes and heading South.  News reports say it may be worse today.

San Diego County was ablaze from its rural north to its border region with Mexico,

The blazes bedeviled firefighters as walls of flame whipped from mountain passes to the edges of the state's celebrated coastline, spreading so quickly that even hotels serving as temporary shelters for evacuees had to be evacuated.

Wanda Tomkinson, 79, fled the Doubletree hotel in Del Mar with her husband and their Boston Terrier after employees called each room to tell customers they had to leave. The couple, carrying medication, clothes, tax records and a dog bowl, said they were relying on a family friend to take them in.

In the northern part of the county, 500 homes and 100 businesses had been destroyed as a wildfire exploded to 145,000 acres and marched toward the Pacific Coast enclave of Del Mar, forcing a partial evacuation.