It was a hot and hazy weekend, very unusual for the Bay Area. When I stepped outside at 7am Saturday morning to pick up the newspapers from the driveway, there was a distinct smell of smoke in the air, as of nearby fireplace smoke (though surely no one uses wood-burning fireplaces anymore, not in California, not in the drought) or a nearby brush fire. I didn’t see any smoke in the air, and I checked the local news sites and found nothing, so it wasn’t until mid-day that I saw news about how the big fires 100 miles north of the SF Bay Area were still burning and because of weather patterns, the smoke was blowing south all across the bay.
We (Yeong, I, and Jimmy, Yeong’s older son, now living with us) attended a surprise birthday party for friends, down in Los Gatos, in the unusually warm heat. Because of the heat — in the 90s around the Bay, over 100 inland (Livermore etc), very rare — there was a smog advisory, officials asking people to drive less. Sunday was a bit less hazy, but still warm, and so we skipped our usual weekly hike, and watched the DVD of “The Lego Movie” in the early afternoon instead, before shopping and dining in the Pacific East Mall.
