We’re fine, our home is fine, and all our nearest neighbors are fine, as is most of downtown. We got home today and found everything just as we left it four days ago. In the meantime we stayed with my sister, her husband, and her two dogs, who kindly took us in along with our dog, and made us feel very secure and cared for. Thank you, all of you who contacted us and expressed your concern.

I’d never been evacuated before. It’s a surreal experience, especially early on when you don’t know whether you’ll have a home to return to. All I can say is that the more information local governments can provide evacuees the better, whether it’s positive or negative news. Information makes people feel less helpless and forgotten and tells them what they need to do, how to begin as soon as possible to get back to normal and to find a thread connecting them to their future. Sitting and waiting without much information doesn’t work for most of us. I learned in the past four days that it definitely doesn’t work for me, and I usually think of myself as a fairly patient person. (more…)

Yesterday felt like a rerun of my birthday four years ago when I spent the day worrying about a fire at nearby Camp Pendleton. That year the wind changed to a Santa Ana, carrying that fire away from us. But a few days later the Cedar Fire started, and burned 280,278 acres, 2,820 buildings (including 2,232 homes), and killed 15 people. About a year and a half before that was the Gavilan Fire, which came within 1/2 mile of my home.

When I was a kid I thought Santa Ana winds were sort of exciting, though even then I didn’t like the heat that came with them, or the dry air that made my hair crackle and my skin feel like paper. But now, after so many fires and worries, I’d rather be out of town when this weather kicks in. The humidity was in the single digits all day yesterday, and it’s every bit as dry today. I slept very little last night, spending most of it listening to the wind tear around the house, creaking the walls and whipping things around outside, and wondering whether all of Ramona (36,000 population) and all of Potrero got evacuated, and how far the fires would spread during the night and all that wind.

This morning I woke to a phone call from my sister, who’d heard on the news that there was a fire in Rainbow, about 5 to 10 miles from me. So today is a fire watch day, hoping the wind will settle down, hoping the air will moisten, and hoping our firefighters aren’t stretched too thin.

I turned 51 yesterday. I think I’m getting too old for this.

This is a political and diplomatic soup I never expected as a result of global warming, but I never was all that good at chess either.

Political dramas are playing out over the Northwest Passage, igniting fresh strife regarding who owns northern waters and the numerous islands that are revealed as ice melts.

If you’d like a look at what’s happening by way of the now-familiar backward chronology of a blog, check out BBC News’ Diary: Taking the Northwest Passage. It chronicles an actual passage by David Shukman on board ship with the Canadian Coast Guard. He includes information about the disputes that have risen in the past and may again in the near future. Shukman also answers questions from readers, with the help of Professor Jean-Eric Tremblay, the chief scientist of the expedition, in Northwest Passage: Your questions answered.

If you wonder how much global warming could change your nearest coastline in the next two decades, take a look at ABC’s What Global Warming Looks Like. It features the work of Edward Mazria, an architect who turned to spreading information about global warming and the contribution to it by the building industry. He’s produced a set of images showing what he predicts some large coastal cities in the US will look like in 2030, with projected rising water levels due to global warming.

Thanks to Georganna Hancock at A Writer’s Edge, for her post, Writing on Blog Action Day, and its heads-up that today is Blog Action Day for the Environment.

I’m in one of those quiet times when I think about things to write, and sometimes even write them, but I don’t post. So the blog is quiet. This is not an apology. I’ve decided that irregular blogging doesn’t require apology. It usually means we’re living more outside the blog or the Internet, and that is often for the best.

We’re getting our typical early fall weather, which isn’t really fall at all, but an evaporated extension of summer. A few cool, rainy days fooled us into thinking this autumn might turn out otherwise, but not so. Now we’re getting the really dry weather that saps the moisture out of every living thing, including me. My skin doesn’t like it, my hair doesn’t like it, and neither does the rest of me. Every contact with a metal object results in a little blue spark, making me cautious and twitchy. Maybe that caution extends to writing and is what keeps me from posting.

This is the time of year that I envy those who live where fall turns spectacular colors. Here we get drab yellowing, and maybe a little dull orange if the leaves don’t dry up and blow away in a Santa Ana wind before they have a chance to turn. I love fall colors, so I gravitate toward pictures of true autumn, and I’m grateful to all the bloggers in other places who share their photos of fall. Fall is my favorite season, and I crave as much as I can get.

According to PRNewswire, Dennis Kucinich, in an impassioned plea five years ago, made a point-by-point argument against going to war in Iraq. He analyzed what he knew of the intelligence, and he persuaded 132 other legislators to vote against going to war. You can read the text of his speech five years ago in this PDF document.

Where would we be today if more people had listened?