Coming Back to Normalcy?

 One of the best things my wife and I did besides buy a Blue Merle Corgi puppy is to spend the last month in Mount Shasta in a friend's guest house overlooking a beautiful mountain meadow.

However, as we know nothing is perfect in this world and as beautiful as this place was and as far away from most coronavirus cases it was it still wasn't perfect in that in the summer the volcanic dust around Mt. Shasta was harder for me to deal with than when I was younger. In other words the sort of grimy feeling you get in your fingers from a fine layer of dust on everything is hard to get used to if you mostly have been living somewhere else on the coast for the last 30 years time. The last time I lived in Mt. Shasta with my ex-wife and children was 1992 just before we moved back to the SF Bay Area and bought another business there then. 

So, this month in Mt. Shasta was heaven in a lot of ways but at 72 I found it harder to adjust to being at altitude there even though it is only 3500 to 3800 feet around the town of Mt. Shasta. Strangely enough when I drove up to 6000 or 7000 feet in altitude places like Castle Lake or Panther Meadows on Mt. Shasta (Castle lake is across from Mount Shasta whereas Bunny Flat and Panther Meadow are up the Everitt Memorial Highway).

Then on Monday we came back home to the SF Bay Area and the smoke and the RED Sun which is what the sun looks through through heavy smoke. If you haven't been reading the news on California fires we have been in sort of a disaster smoke mode over most of the state from the fires almost a month now.

But, luckily where my wife and I live the smoke has gone high not low so even if the sun is orange or red we aren't smelling the smoke but only feeling the depression of our neighbors who have been going through the smoke for around a month so far. Also, the smoke seems to be cooling the weather so that we are getting much more high and low fog than we would normally in September. Normally, September is a pretty sunny month but not this year with all the smoke high up in the atmosphere.

So, I guess you could say we are in a new normal and hopefully all the people who choked on smoke have gone to the hospital and gone on oxygen or whatever they needed to do state wide at this point.

Many fires are still burning but the 3 worst near to us are pretty much out so we are grateful for that even though many many houses and outbuildings have burned down.

So, are we coming back to normalcy?

I don't think that is possible for ANYONE on earth right now in the age of Coronavirus.

Normal left around january or February 2020 and likely will never return again.

But, we might have some kind of new normal within a few years to get used to.