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It's not terrorism. It's only the Santa Ana winds and this usually happens every year but we're already in a tizzy. Half a million people evacuated from their homes (a lot of them my friends and co-workers), hundreds of structures burned down. Some of the fires were accidental (as in downed electric poles igniting dry brush) but a few are suspected of being arson. Hope to God they catch the arsonists before they spread their destruction further. Today the wind has slowed down a bit and tomorrow should be better. My heart goes out to all those who have been rendered homeless. The conflagration could have been worse and fires could have broken out in a hundred other points. We here in Glendale are just lucky. A wind-driven fire here could obliterate the foothills. Many lives would have been lost and property damage would have gone into the tens of billions. We pray every night that we be spared from disasters, man-made and natural, because we know how devastating they can be. We should be more disaster-prepared I know. We've been kind of putting things off. Hopefully, we'll be able to put things together and make an honest to goodness disaster-preparedness plan. Last night, the basketball goal in front of our house which is at least 500 pounds was blown down and fortunately it fell onto the driveway. If it had crashed onto the roof of our garage, it would have cost a pretty sum to repair. Now, I have to wait for about 5 people to help me raise it upright so that my son can play basketball again. I'm going to put several sacks of sand on top of the base of the goal so that the wind cannot budge it next time. Our fruit trees in the backyard have been stripped bare of their leaves - only the kalamansi tree still has its leaves and quite a few ripe kalamansi ready for picking. Tomorrow I will make lemonade and wish the Santa Ana winds good riddance.
We're finally into the fall season and temperatures have gotten cooler. Now we can switch our sprinkler system to watering every other day and that means savings. Our son is back in school - he's in Third Grade. My wife and I take turns driving him to school in the morning and then picking him up between two and three in the afternoon. Tuesday afternoon he has choir practice when he gets off from class and then he walks to the nearby parish church for his relegious education class. It's so convenient that even the public school is close to the parish church. On Thursday afternoon he has violin class at 4 pm. The rest of the week he has a playdate with one or the other classmate. We only have one kid and he already takes up a huge chunk of our time just taking care of his needs. I don't know how other couples do it with two or more children. I guess parents learn how to cope any way they can. For us, our work schedule revolves around our son's life. I work during the day (12 hours) while my wife works at night. I get to be with my son every single night. On the three days (sometimes four) of the week that I work, my wife drives my on to and from school. Luckily, sometimes my Mom stays with us so that on the days when my wife and I have to go to work we have somebody to leave my son with during that one hour interval when neither of us are home. My Mom sometimes stays for a week with my younger brother Hector in Woodland Hills, some 45 minutes away. On those days when she's not around, my wife just brings our son to her hospital when she goes to work and then I pick him up there when I in turn get off from work. And so this is my life: work, home, chores, grocery, mall, movies, tv. Every once in a while we go to the beach or go some place for a week or two. We can't undertake any social commitments for now. We tried, for a while, but it put us under so much stress that we had to resign from all of them. Perhaps when our son is in college we will have more time for social commitments.
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