Getting through Sacramento the first Saturday with the first [of many[!] “Black Friday’s” traffic was curious, pathetic even, but on the hill an hour and a half of the BBC’s unending reiteration of their three minutes of actual news about the horror that was Paris lulled me to distraction; “three coordinated attacks, three sets of identical Kalashnikov AK47s, three suspects slipping back over the border into Belgium and a suicide bomber’s Syrian asylum seeker’s passport at the stadium”…a sequence of events one might eventually rewind to some USAF “pilot” in a secure undisclosed bunker pushing the button labelled “death from above” in righteous service of that “freedom they all hate us for” before clocking out and going home to his BBQ, suburban wife and off-duty life outside somewhere like Las Vegas or San Bernadino, safe ‘n’ sound, no boots on the ground. A surgical strike but grounds for some poor “fanatic”, having lost his subsistence and every thing and one he ever loved, to attempt returning the message of pain to sender…and not entirely in revenge…or so I muse until the signal faded at the Summit and Reno came in with comical cowboy music.

Otherwise over the hill on a Saturday was no trouble at all; light traffic, dry roads and not a trace of those massive quantities of snow the local media were so hysterically predicting…as can be seen from this picture taken going over Donner Summit;

Down the other side, Sierra Valley and east…

Once northbound on 395 I recalled trips up that highway in the fifties when ranging sufficiently far north to visit a La Canada photographer holed up in a camper-shelled pickup on some creek a bit beyond Bridgeport was exotic indeed.  Another world. Thinking how those eastern Sierran forays in the February of my life have ultimately led to this November afternoon in the life’s assumed November; scant traffic moving nicely and none at all after Doyle on the dirt;

…a few hunters outbound as the afternoon progressed and beyond Espil’s a new Texas Tundra, fourdoor and white, which I passed just before the blue pit…

He went by in late light as I pulled in the gate and was just able to unload before, sun behind the hills, the pleasant temperature plummeted drastically into a quiet night, and dark.

First day, overcast and brown; dust blew up the desert all morning…

A dead bunny, not funny, and after lunch the afternoon turned to rain squalls;

Very nice; worked in the repo racking the remaining paintings from France, summer of 1991.

Monday came up chilly and bright, with dry snow on the ground and no flow from the koi well, staying that way…

…unto end of day

Tuesday was grey and overcast; and now no flow from either well. Many chores got done, and a friend came to lunch…

…but the sun didn’t show until just before it had to go and so, first three days. Well, four counting the drive.

M