I took a long shower this morning. So much for doing my part.
I used to shower under a garden hose tossed over a wind tunnel. Well, only after playing lunch hour basketball in the summer heat. Why there was a wind tunnel between the hose bib and the showering place can never be known. It was a matter of arbitrary placement of multiple objects.
California is famous for its droughts. What really happens though is not that we have droughts. What happens is that human beings come in and try to define local weather patterns by some unnatural imported notion. The notion is that water is a resource that we should be able to depend on. That means more or less the same amount every year. But California weather doesn't work like that.
So every seven or eight years we get a shitload of precipitation, and "not enough" the other years. Of course there really is enough water. Just not enough for thirty million suburbanites and the massive agribusiness that feeds them.
Well, fuck them. Here's my solution: If you can't prove an ancestor was here on the first day of 1900, out you go.
Today, we have enough water. Too much, damn near. The water resource managers are fretting over whether to release water now to make room for the expected overage and risk stressing the levees, or hold on and risk having more water than they can hold later. Adding to it is the enormous amount of moisture stored on mountainsides in the form of snow. One warm spring storm and somewhere there will be submerged suburbs, guaranteed.
Sunday I drove here and there for this reason and that, and as is my wont took lots of pictures. Some of these were of the river. It is pretty much as high as they like to let it go. I've seen it higher, but when it's higher than this, the bike trail gets washed away, and if much higher than that, people who live near the levees start checking their flood insurance documents. It's good press but bad ju-ju. And though I've always lived above the flood plane and like a good disaster as much as anyone, I sincerely hope nothing newsworthy happens.
Not very impressive, I agree
6 comments:
OK, see ya later. One grandfather showed up here in 1909, another in 1940. Wait, though! A grandmother was in Southern California when the grandfather showed up in 1909, I think. I guess I don't have to leave just yet, but I don't know that she was here before 1900.
Boris-in-Ossory here we come!
I could be talked into making it 1946. Too much change during the war to reverse.
Phew!I made the cut, but only on the paternal side. My mom didn't move to S.F. until 1955.
Whoa. Newby. My great-great-grandfather was hauling fresh water from San Q in the 1880s.
Does that mean I have property (and water) rights that supercede all a youse? My Quaker greatxsomething uncle left for California a couple of years before my great grandfather was born in 1844.
That may have been Richard, a safe call since there were a lot of Richards in the line, but it could have been Eusebius. I'll look it up if anyone cares.
Anyway, I don't actually live in Cali but I figure that gives me a pretty good claim on the right to.
IMHO, anyone who came here before word of the gold strike became news back east (late summer 1848) confers honorary Californiadom on his relatives in perpetuity. I'm generous like that.
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