Though it is noon on Tuesday it is still only 58 degrees on the SF Bay Coast

 I found myself wanting to turn up the heater and realized I had left the flue open in the fireplace. I was thinking that pushing the lever towards the back was closed and finally realized that I had it backwards and so pulled the flue lever towards me. 

One of the things if you build a fire in a fireplace for extra warmth this winter is to realize that you don't want to have your flue closed when you build your fire because unless it is open it's going to smoke out your whole house. Even if you are lighting the gas you don't want all the smoke and gas fumes out in your house either. So, sometimes a fireplace might not even have a flue because it is set up only really for gas fires in the fireplace so it's good to be aware of this too. The Hotel we stayed in in Portland visiting my son in Early September had one of these with the pilot light on all the time so you could turn up the gas for more heat any time you wanted to. Several hotels we have stayed in had this kind of Set up even one.

I think we stayed in Kingston, near Bainbridge Island after having some lunch on Bainbridge Island after we took our car on the Ferry to Bainbridge from Seattle where we had also stayed a couple of night there overlooking the Puget Sound which is an inland sea there. The Ferries work great because the storms cannot make the waves very big because the lands and islands keep the waves lower so ferries work good there moving trucks and cars and people all over this inland sea area.

So, getting used to temperatures being 10 to 15 degrees lower all of a sudden likely is making people sick from California to Seattle and up into Vancouver Canada about now. However, so far I'm okay. However, the Covid Shot last Friday messed me up for a day or two but, I'm basically okay now.

We are having our redwood bark moved to our backyard and putting white rocks in our front yard around our tall pine and other trees. So, we are moving towards a more southern California drought resistant form which also takes less maintenance than before. Now all we have to do is to have the pine needles and other leaves blow away in the front yard once a week which is pretty easy to do because the blower won't usually pick up the white crushed Rocks. The power company chewed up the tops of one of our trees pretty bad so we might have to remove that tree because it's not doing well since they cut it back so much. However, the power lines were right above that one so maybe they had to do this before the storms arrive.

Anyway, hopefully you can stay warm enough wherever you are during this shift to much colder weather in California, Oregon and Washington states.