Beautiful Day

I've had a couple weeks now, driving my car with the new transmission and axels. It works great. As good as new. I'm very happy with it.

The sky is blue, crystal clear, and on my walk this morning I could clearly see the Sierra Buttes up at the Sierra Crest (top) and the Sutter Buttes (extinct volcano north of Sacramento) and the Coast Range mountains beyond, which are tall enough to get consistent snow on them in the winter time and generate their own weather, and have a banana belt (warm dry air) on this side of them, which looks like a grassy desert most of the year. John Muir wanted to build a Grand Staircase park there from one side of the mountain to the other, since it shows of some biomes which interests botanists but largely nobody else.

I would like to live up on those mountains. Maybe with a trailer I could move around for the best views. Weather being what it is, the colder the night, the better the view the next day. And it was 50'F last night. I could feel it with my window cracked open a couple inches. Up there? It probably froze last night, and from the mountaintop I should be able to see Mount Lassen, Mount Shasta, Mount Diablo, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean, complete with fog banks and the various storms that roll in across Northern California, producing the usual hundred twenty inches of rain that area gets, but generally misses us down here. Despite the earthquakes, that area really deserves development, with retirement homes and proper full service hospitals with cardiac and cancer treatment so old people will move there and spend their money. Eureka has some of that, but the real hospital still ends up sending its patients to Santa Rosa, my home town, rather than the local clinic, which kills patients, apparently, with anything more serious than a broken bone. I don't know that as fact, only that their reputation, even today, is terrible. Perhaps if there were a medical school at Humboldt State this wouldn't happen anymore. The NW part of California is avoided by tourists who spend weeks cruising the Oregon Coast, largely because NW California is nasty and unfriendly, while Oregon Coast loves tourists and welcomes them. What will it take to make the California Coast friendly? Probably better roads, paying jobs, and a future worth having. Tricky when all the money in California gets spent in LA and San Francisco. This is exactly why Jefferson has so much traction. They want to develop the North, long ignored by LA and Sacramento, and make something of the resources through tourism and retirement communities. If you can have fantastic gardens in Portland and Bellevue, which are colder and wetter, why not Eureka? That whole area should be rose gardens and flowers and fantastic houses where the rainfall becomes beautiful. It really should. This is sane and far more useful than building in deserts like Patterson.

Also, I want to say thank you to Grocery Outlet for your low prices. Shopping there means rubbing elbows with the welfare coupon crowd and the pot growers, but at least they can afford soap and toilet paper, despite being off-brand. Also, they have decent prices for things like eggs and crackers and wines. A great wine selection. So many Lodi Zinfandels, and a fair number of Napa ones too. Their lunch meats are a reasonable price, so you can afford to make a proper sandwich. Just don't expect the brand you buy today to be there tomorrow. Stuff comes and goes. Its not dented cans either, btw. Those are illegal to sell. These are just stuff that doesn't sell well at major grocery chains so it gets auctioned off and arrives there. When you're a good cook like me, you can make something of it.

Anyway, back to my novel editing project. If I can really polish it up properly, back into a sparkling gem, it will be ready to Publish for Money, very important detail, the money.