It started at the end of June. I looked out my kitchen window & thought I saw something like smoke coming from a utility pole outside my house. It was drizzling at the time so I figured it was some sort of weird condensation effect. I looked again. And it sure seemed like smoke so I kept watching until I saw the flames. The utility pole was on fire! I called 911. The fire department came & squirted some water on the pole. The fire was out before it got to the transformer. PG&E came by later that evening & did some repair work.

Less than a week later, there was a brush fire on a dry hillside about two blocks away from my house. Read the full story (with pictures!) here.

Then I went to Santa Barbara for a long weekend. I came home to a note on my door from the fire department. They had been back, this time to shut off my water. Turns out a pipe broke in my garden's drip irrigation system. I'd flooded two of my neighbor's houses so the fire department (who knew they did that?) turned off my water at the street.

A couple weeks later, I was sitting in my living room, catching up on email when I heard a huge crash and the house shook. I looked out the window to see a large American sedan impaled on the side of my next door neighbor's house. I can't quite figure out how the driver did it - perhaps the house was moving too quickly? After hitting the side of the house, she (the driver) backed up and drove away. She was pretty slow about it & I got her license plate.

And then a couple weeks after that, I was driving back from Oregon on I5. There was another fire, this time a grass fire on the side of the freeway. No fire trucks around yet. It looked like someone's cigarette had ignited the dry brush.

So what's next?