Margret Sloan

California continues to burn. The photos on Yahoo News are fascinating in a macbre way. The view from Sausalito eastward to the San Franciso skyline is usually crisp and clear except for a couple hours of fog in the mornings. Now it is a thick brown-gray haze of smoke from all the wildfires. It must be very difficult to even breathe for hundreds of miles around the City by the Bay. Tourism is down - huge sections of Hwy 1 are closed, people are being evacuated, and there is no view of the ocean to attract the tourists as the smoke is everywhere and the danger is very real.

The Governor’s Office of Emergency Services maintains an awesome website that has an interactive Google map of the fires. You can click on a fire icon and a text box opens with detail of that particular fire area, including current status of containment and the number of acres affected. Click here to see the current map - it is very disconcerting. As of this morning there are over 1,000 wildfires burning out of control, with weather forecasts of more storms with high winds and lightning. So things are not looking good for No Cal.

Last year the California fires making the news were the southern California wildfires. All around Los Angeles and San Diego there were dozens of major fires that took months to put out. Even the upscale and exclusive Malibu Beach area lost multi million dollar homes to the fires. People were being forced to leave their homes and camp out at the San Diego football stadium for over a week while firefighters battled to save entire neighborhoods.

This year it is northern California, with over 1,000 fires burning today and the news shows airing clips of officials crying for helping - they don’t have enough manpower or resources to even show up at all the fires burning, most of them caused by lightning strikes over the past several days.

It’s hard to imagine that areas so close to the Pacific ocean are suffering from severe drought this early in the summer season and that dry trees and brush all over the far western states is a waiting tinderbox.

There’s no way I could ever agree to make California my state of primary residence. There are just too many natural disasters waiting to take your property and your life. It’s a nice place to visit, but I’ll never live there.

Still looking good for our planned camping trip this weekend. The weather forecast so far says no rain. Still too early to tell, though, so we are keeping the dates in pencil and if it turns bad at the last minute we can change the date without much trouble.

One of the fun parts of this weekend is that my girlfriend and her hubby are going camping, too, and they have a small bass boat. They’ve offered to camp close to us, depending upon what campsites are available at the lake, and take us out on the boat a few times. That would be great!

If they are going to be nice enough to take us fishing, I want to buy something nice to give them as a thank you gift. I can order something online tonight and have it delivered in time for our trip on Friday. I found a nice web site, American Marine Supply, with lots of nautical supplies and novelties. They have all kinds of boating supplies and even nautical jewelry. Since I don’t know what gear they already have, I’m trying to find something either useful, funny, or pretty.

I’ll surf through the web site and see what kind of boat accessories they have and order the gift tonight. If we don’t go camping this weekend, I can save it for the weekend that we do all go, but I hope the weather holds and we can go - I’m looking forward to it.

We want to introduce our grandson to camping and have been waiting for the right time to take off a couple days from work. Now that we have everything covered at work, we are waiting for the right weather. Looks like we have a good chance of good weather this coming weekend. I don’t want to be sleeping in a tent during a thunderstorm, especially if that’s his first night camping.

We have a great tent, sleeping bags, cooler and plenty of fishing gear. Yesterday we stopped by Wal-Mart to see if we needed anything else to pick up and found a few things. I bought a couple flashlights and a can of bug spray. We’ll wait to buy the groceries until we get closer to the weekend and know for sure that we’re going.

So cross your fingers for us that we have a good weekend!

Gas prices have kept going up and are over $4.00 a gallon now in the Franklin gas stations. Closer to my house it hovers around $3.89 per gallon. This is a huge increase over last year’s prices of around $2.39 - I remember freaking out that it was over $2.50 in San Francisco. Now I hear that is around $4.50 after just one year since I was last out there.

My sister was sweet enough to suggest that we get a cash back or gas rebate type of credit cards to help save a few extra cents off each gallon of gas that we buy. I hadn’t really thought of that and decided to look into it. I used the credit cards club website to read up on the gas rebate programs and find a good card to apply for online. Their top four card recommendations for gas rewards programs are all types of Discover Cards. The one that caught my eye says that you get a 5% rebate on all gasoline and auto maintenance purchases. If you paid for an oil change lately you will know that the cost of an oil change has gone up about the same rate as the cost of gasoline these past several months. So you save on oil changes and other auto related things beside just gas, and 5% is a nice little sum to put back into your wallet at the end of the day.