Yesterday’s twilight brought weather that was very strange; maybe not for lots of places, but for our little corner of the world. It was dry and hot most of the day, then – in the early evening – it clouded up and started to rain with big fat rain drops like it sometimes does in the Sierras after a hot day. With the rain, came thunder without lightning, although, intellectually, we knew there must be lightning somewhere and the sunlight was hiding what was going on just over the ridge. That evening, when we went out for dinner, the rain had stopped, the temperature dropped 30 degrees, and there was lightning everywhere. On the way home, we could see lightning sweeping across the bay and over the Fremont Hills. It was also warmer again which lead us to hypothecate that the temperature drop was from evaporation as everything was dry again.   

This morning we got several ALERTS on our phone – cell phones, not on the vestigial land line, we noticed – that there was a fire in nearby Bear Gulch and several roads were closed. Cal Fire started bringing in equipment but it was sitting in a meadow close to our house but far from the fire. Driving to Marin, the radio said that ten acres were burning, on the way back, they said fifty acres and a couple of helicopters had joined the Cal Fire trucks. Now, in the evening, the skies are clear, the temperature has dropped from a high of 90 to 75 and the helicopters are still flying.