Filth and fires.

Despite being a promotional piece for a Clorox line (Green Works), this guy's work is like a truly clever version of writing "Wash Me!" on your filthy station wagon.

I'm down in Santa Cruz for the weekend. We came for the Live Earth Farm summer solstice celebration, but a fire started about three miles from the farm yesterday afternoon as we were driving over. The plume of smoke was huge at first and traffic into Aptos was a nightmare. Yesterday also boasted record heat, apparently in the 100s, so I felt especially bad that we opted to bring the rabbits with us and they were stuck in a travel cage in the back seat of the car for over an hour. (They're fine, hanging out in an x-pen in the garage where it's nice and cool.) The fire is supposedly contained and from what we can tell, the celebration is still on, but the air is still smoky.

Fire season started early and it's already off to a spectacular start. There have been at least three destructive fires in the Santa Cruz and Monterey areas, where there are lots of farms and livestock. I heard stories from one of my usual farmers' market guys after the Corralitos fire that it was raining ash into some delicate lettuce and plenty have endured evacuations. Between the fires in California agricultural areas and the floods in the midwestern cornfields, it's not a great year for farming.

As a petty end note, I'm using Kevin's dad's computer, equipped with Vista and IE. At home I run Ubuntu and Firefox on an old laptop and for all the bells and whistles this machine should have, I have to say I hate using it. IE is having a hard time dealing with tabs and every time it crashes (often, if I watch a Flash video or the security software pops up with a minor update) I lose all my open tabs. This is basic web browsing, to me. A brand-new Cadillac may be powerful, but I'll stick with my beaten up old Civic.