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-Princess Bride quote: "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father. Prepare to die."-

Vaguely disturbing dream in which I cut out a chunk of my arm and shaped it into a fixed-width solid. Took my brain a while to realize that such a procedure would produce quantities of blood, but when it finally caught on... well, I was stuck holding a rapidly reddening bandage against my arm for the remainder of the dream. I blame lingering memories of the vaccinations I got a while back. Oh, and also, I found out when I woke up this morning that it is possible to cut off one's circulation in such a way that half of one's lip falls asleep. A very disconcerting feeling, let me say.

It is very smoky outside today. Surprising how much more oppressive the heat gets when the air is choking with particulates. Such is life in the Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM, I suppose. It does give the sky a beautiful grey color, almost like it's overcast and about to rain. Always makes the plants look so wonderfully green, instead of washing them out like a blue sky does. The fires are somewhat near my area, but not close enough to be dangerous, just smoky. And sneezy -- ash is, not surprisingly, disagreeable to one's lungs.

Somehow the ashy smell and the mugginess make people move slower, when they're outdoors, almost as if they're in some sort of sci-fi regime where all their movements are scripted. Makes the sidewalks suddenly seem so long and lonely. It's funny. Earthquakes truly don't faze native GDDoDers, but I guess even we can't be so lighthearted about fires. See, earthquakes are sort of amusing -- they feel like you're on a ship or something, just hit some swells -- and you can trick yourself into thinking that you can be smart enough to avoid getting hurt, plus the major ones don't come every year, and when they do come, they only last for a couple minutes at most. Fires... fire season comes every year. With fires, you know many of them are not just freaks of nature (granted, most of the ones now were started by lightning) but are the result of some person making a mistake or willfully throwing a ribbon of death. And the grass and the wind pick it up, and it is beyond control.

I think it's the heat too. There is enough heat, enough dryness, enough talk of water rationing, drought, and then a fire comes and makes everything worse. It's no wonder all the ancients were obsessed with fire. I see the pall of misty smoke outside, that all-stilling embrace, and I think I might have been obsessed too, if I lived then.

Reality check. Mild weather? Ha!