Joe and I took a couple of hours off of packing today to have lunch with friends in Roseville. Karl and Molly met up with us at Blue House Korean BBQ. It was lovely to choose and cook a variety of foods from their All You Can Eat Menu.
The best part though was getting to know Molly a bit better
and catching up with Karl on a variety of topics he and I had talked about at
Joe’s retirement luncheon back in December. Karl has worked with Joe for a number
of years; however, he has been exclusively working remotely since COVID hit. Karl
is a mechanical engineer, and his personal passion is restoring old cars. We
enjoyed the opportunity to spend some ‘real’ time with Molly as the first and
only time we had met her was at her wedding several years ago. She had other
priorities that day!
Great company and good food made for a terrific break in our
packing and cleaning routine.
As we were driving to Roseville (about 45 minutes away at
10:30am) it started raining heavily. The traffic was good in that people were
keeping safe distances. At one point our car told us that the car camera system
had been deactivated. Since we could not see more than about 10 feet in front
of us through the volume of rain it was understandable. At the time, this
thought ran through my mind, “Joe said he wanted to leave Woodland to be in an
environment where there is more water.”
We sure have had a lot of water falling from the sky this
year. One rainy season is not going to fix the California drought though. One hundred
percent (100%) of yolo County is categorized as Abnormally Dry with moderate
drought conditions. Eighty-one percent (81.04%) of Yolo County is categorized
as Severe Drought. According to the website https://www.drought.gov/states/california/county/yolo
this means that grazing land is inadequate, fire season is longer with high
burn intensity and large fire spatial extent, and trees are stressed; plants
increase reproductive mechanisms and wildlife diseases increase.
For Joe the drought has limited his capacity to garden. We
take our role as responsible citizens to heart and try to conserve water. Both our
front and back yards have been garden areas for over thirteen years. We try to
raise plants that require little watering. In the backyard we used hay to keep weeds
down and to keep the watering we did do from evaporating quickly in the heat.
Now, it’s only fair that I check Minnesota’s drought status
as I heard they also have been experiencing drought conditions. The county we
are most likely moving to is Wright County and they do not have drought conditions
this year. Up until January of this year there were parts of Wright County that
were ranked as Abnormally Dry. This changed with 2023 experiencing the 29th wettest year-to-date over
the past 129 years. https://www.drought.gov/states/minnesota/county/Wright
My daughter called me this morning to check in and shared
that the dogs – who normally love the snow – are only going outside for quick
bathroom breaks and even then they are not happy about it. Charlotte and Caleb
were home from school Wednesday and Thursday of last week due to snowstorms. She
said it warmed up yesterday and then today it was raining ice. While she was
talking to me, she was relaying a play-by-lay of the USPS woman intentionally
angling her truck into snowbanks as the roads were slippery and of her neighbor
man trying to get back up his driveway after picking up his mail. It was
amusing Megan. The man wasn’t so amused.
Maybe next year, I’ll be looking out of a window and writing
about the neighbors.
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