It's 9:45am on a cloudless Wednesday morning here in summertime California.

My light meter reads 14 lux pointed directly at the sky — about as much as the middle of the night (with local light pollution), or about 1/1000 as much as a normal morning. They tell me that the skies are this apocalyptic shade of red due to the smoke from the 16 major wildfires currently burning in California¹. Local news has plenty to say on the cause if you want to read up. Damn if it isn't disconcerting to live through, though.

What world did I …

PSA for folks in the Bay Area: The University of California Botanical Garden has re-opened for limited, outdoor-only visits. Seems like a nice (and reasonably) safe place to go during the pandemic. It's July, so not much is in bloom, but it's still beautiful.

Today we got a nasty surprise in the form of an email from my next-door neighbor informing me that somebody had attempted to break into our home¹! An hour later (while I was on my way home from work), we got another email indicating that the suspect had been arrested.

Apparently, someone was messing around with the lock on the gate to our backyard and my next-door neighbor yelled at them. They hopped the fence, so he called the police and yelled at them some more. They fled. The police came² , patrolled the neighborhood, and caught the guy …

Hello infrequent readers: here's a piece of good news for once: as of October 27th, I've moved! $SPOUSE and I now live in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley, California in a nice little two-bedroom one-and-a-half-bedroom single-family residence. It's a little surreal; even though where we live has a pretty nice mixed-use vibe (there's an apartment building around the corner, a bunch of restaurants nearby, and a Whole Foods only a few blocks away), it's still practically rural compared to the apartment in the Tendernob that I've lived in for the last eight years¹.

It's been a stressful move; the …