whether we like it or not we slavishly follow Caltrans CCTV and the road conditions over the hill as well as several sometimes contradictory weather forecasts, all of which indicated things were bound to Get Worse.  Plus first thing Wednesday they were chaining from

Truckee to Kingvale and vice versa and worse than that wouldn’t be much fun.  Not to mention it was snowing at Wall…so off into the murk we went as planned, murk which soon subsided

until by Empire everything was fine up to Truckee [not shown]

where trucks were backed up a couple of miles putting chains on for mere wetness over the pass and then stopped again at Kingvale to remove them.  We ourselves stopped at Eagle Lakes,

subsequently experienced patches of dense fog descending, rain across the Valley and more

rain unloading in Benicia before a symmetrical Valentine’s Day curry at Mai Thai.

Early Thursday the tree cutters were here, massively pruning our errant pepper

and other wild incursions but were gone by noon along with, very temporarily, the rains.

The days were nothing if not entirely and entertainingly unpredictable…

On the weekend I was finally able to get a look at Garry Winogrand Color where apparently for some years he carried around two cameras so he could shoot [prolifically as was his wont] in both that and black and white.  One thing that struck me was how bulky the clothes were back

then and also how done up everyone was; men in suits and narrow ties, women more often than not with necklaces, often pearls…even gloves on the midday streets.  Of course that was midtown Manhattan in the sixties, yeah, but still…as for pure balanced colors and composition, though, the atypical one above really stood out…all in all a most revelatory and rewarding book.   Come Tuesday everything had to be moved out of the back to accommodate scaffolding

for the stucco guys while out front, after a bit of running around in the ’45 to effect a steering

repair, my brother Kirk arrived with rented lights to document paintings, reshooting a few

“corrupted” files left by The Asshole two years ago but mainly documenting everything since

which occupied us until a late lunch of enchiladas and street tacos from Nani’s gave us the chance to catch up before he set off south in the rain. Last day of rain, they said; we’ll see…