Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 32
March 17, 2023
The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
I reread this while I was under 9 feet of snow, on the theory that it would make me more appreciative of the fact that I was not literally starving and I had plenty of food more varied than brown bread, and also quite a lot of books.
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
[image error] [image error]
comments
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
[image error] [image error]
comments
March 15, 2023
Base Notes, by Lara Elena Donnelly
A noir thriller with a single but crucial non-realistic element, which is that the narrator, Vic, can create perfumes which evoke memories. I say non-realistic because it’s not done with either magic or non-existent technology: Vic uses real methods of making perfume, and gets unreal results. The rules are consistent: the perfume only works on the person whose memory it is, and the memory has to involve a person who must be killed and used as an ingredient.
Vic owns an avant-garde perfumery, inherited via murdering the previous owner and making him into a perfume, and mostly does non-murdery, non-memory perfumes and runs the murder/memory business as a side gig. Unfortunately, when your side gig involves committing major crimes for terrible rich people, you are liable to end up in the exact sort of situation that Vic ends up in: blackmailed into committing multiple murders in the hope of creating a perfume that accesses other people’s memories—something which probably isn’t possible. To make the situation even more difficult, a private eye suspects and is following Vic for a previous perfume murder.
Vic decides that this situation needs accomplices—one to commit each murder—and selects three potential helpers, each of whom has been personally wronged by one of the prospective victims…
A confident, gripping novel, reminiscent in content of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, in tone of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, and in themes of all of them: obsession, murder, unreliable narrators, social satire, social climbing, and the drive for some kind of transcendence that destroys everything it touches.
If you want a novel about perfume to involve perfume and smells in general, this delivers: there’s a cast of characters listed by how they smell, each chapter has an epigraph of its keynote smells, and Vic has an extraordinarily good sense of smell and tells you what everything smells like. Vic is a completely terrible person (most of the characters are completely or at least largely terrible) but I enjoyed following them for the length of a novel.
I’m mostly avoiding pronouns for Vic as I’m not totally sure what they are. I personally think Vic is transmasc but again, not actually stated.
The supporting characters are classic noir types, updated and fleshed out and placed in a very specific New York City social context. The male patsy is a tailor by occupation and a sub by preference, in a poly relationship with the steely, ruthless woman who’s a photographer/bartender desperate to pay off his medical debt but alarmingly prompt to agree to murder as a way of doing it. The ground-down idealist is a barber about to get priced out of his shop.
Like Vic, they’re artists getting slowly crushed under late capitalism, but seen from a more jaundiced than idealistic perspective. Vic knows that artists needing patrons is not a new issue, and is willing to toss them and their art under the bus if it serves their ends. Vic gets involved with the poly couple and has some real feelings for them, but then again, the last person Vic was in a serious relationship with got turned into perfume.
This isn’t a comedy by any means, but there’s a strong element of deadpan absurdity and black humor running through it. The cast of characters, listed by what they smell like, has several puzzling elements which become clear late in the book, and I actually did laugh out loud when I realized what was going on.
( Read more... )
Like the other books Base Notes reminds me of, it’s more compelling in the first two-thirds. I’m more interested in the rise than the climactic fall, and more interested in the building of relationships than the breaking of them. It’s a bit over-long, which doesn’t help. The characters tend to be overly trusting at the wrong moments to facilitate the murders happening. But overall, it was very enjoyable.
Base Notes is a modern noir with several unusual twists, and it’s generally done very well. Donnelly is the author of the Amberlough series, which I haven’t read.
[image error] [image error]
comments
Vic owns an avant-garde perfumery, inherited via murdering the previous owner and making him into a perfume, and mostly does non-murdery, non-memory perfumes and runs the murder/memory business as a side gig. Unfortunately, when your side gig involves committing major crimes for terrible rich people, you are liable to end up in the exact sort of situation that Vic ends up in: blackmailed into committing multiple murders in the hope of creating a perfume that accesses other people’s memories—something which probably isn’t possible. To make the situation even more difficult, a private eye suspects and is following Vic for a previous perfume murder.
Vic decides that this situation needs accomplices—one to commit each murder—and selects three potential helpers, each of whom has been personally wronged by one of the prospective victims…
A confident, gripping novel, reminiscent in content of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, in tone of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, and in themes of all of them: obsession, murder, unreliable narrators, social satire, social climbing, and the drive for some kind of transcendence that destroys everything it touches.
If you want a novel about perfume to involve perfume and smells in general, this delivers: there’s a cast of characters listed by how they smell, each chapter has an epigraph of its keynote smells, and Vic has an extraordinarily good sense of smell and tells you what everything smells like. Vic is a completely terrible person (most of the characters are completely or at least largely terrible) but I enjoyed following them for the length of a novel.
I’m mostly avoiding pronouns for Vic as I’m not totally sure what they are. I personally think Vic is transmasc but again, not actually stated.
The supporting characters are classic noir types, updated and fleshed out and placed in a very specific New York City social context. The male patsy is a tailor by occupation and a sub by preference, in a poly relationship with the steely, ruthless woman who’s a photographer/bartender desperate to pay off his medical debt but alarmingly prompt to agree to murder as a way of doing it. The ground-down idealist is a barber about to get priced out of his shop.
Like Vic, they’re artists getting slowly crushed under late capitalism, but seen from a more jaundiced than idealistic perspective. Vic knows that artists needing patrons is not a new issue, and is willing to toss them and their art under the bus if it serves their ends. Vic gets involved with the poly couple and has some real feelings for them, but then again, the last person Vic was in a serious relationship with got turned into perfume.
This isn’t a comedy by any means, but there’s a strong element of deadpan absurdity and black humor running through it. The cast of characters, listed by what they smell like, has several puzzling elements which become clear late in the book, and I actually did laugh out loud when I realized what was going on.
( Read more... )
Like the other books Base Notes reminds me of, it’s more compelling in the first two-thirds. I’m more interested in the rise than the climactic fall, and more interested in the building of relationships than the breaking of them. It’s a bit over-long, which doesn’t help. The characters tend to be overly trusting at the wrong moments to facilitate the murders happening. But overall, it was very enjoyable.
Base Notes is a modern noir with several unusual twists, and it’s generally done very well. Donnelly is the author of the Amberlough series, which I haven’t read.
[image error] [image error]
comments
March 13, 2023
Dear Sufficiently Advanced Creator...
Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, unusual formats, etc.
My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats, including art treats. Very open. I love them.
I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, landscape in general, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, and animals. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.
( General DNWs )
( Children of Time Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky )
( The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King )
( Duma Key - Stephen King )
( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )
( The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick )
( Ki and Vandien Quartet - Megan Lindholm )
( Northwest Smith - C. L. Moore )
( Revelator - Daryl Gregory )
( Shadows of the Apt - Adrian Tchaikovsky )
comments
My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats, including art treats. Very open. I love them.
I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, landscape in general, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, and animals. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.
( General DNWs )
( Children of Time Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky )
( The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King )
( Duma Key - Stephen King )
( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )
( The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick )
( Ki and Vandien Quartet - Megan Lindholm )
( Northwest Smith - C. L. Moore )
( Revelator - Daryl Gregory )
( Shadows of the Apt - Adrian Tchaikovsky )
comments
Beach Flight
Since the weather in LA is so relatively nice (zero snow) I thought it might be an opportunity to continue my pilot training. Sure enough, there is a hang gliding school operating within driving distance, Windsports.
Yesterday I had a beach lesson, and took seven instructor-controlled flights (very low, they were literally hanging on to me from the ground) and two solos! Only one crash, plus one failure to launch!
I decided not to mention my two previous lessons, as it's such a tiny amount of experience that I figured it would only confuse their instruction and suck up time while they tried to figure out what I did and didn't already know. The accidental consequence was that I apparently did unusually well for a "first" lesson. That is the first time in my life that has ever happened with a physical skill, so it was gratifying albeit not exactly true. On the plus (and true) side, clearly I learned some stuff from the first two lessons!
The beach site was so much easier than the San Bernardino site. The wind blew in from the ocean, the slope was much gentler (and shorter) which enabled the instructors to physically control a flight, and no matter how far off-course you go, you're still going to be landing on sand.
The first couple flights were fun but not as exhilarating as in San Bernardino, and I couldn't figure out why until my instructor finally let go of my harness and then the I'm FLYYYYING factor instantly returned. It's interesting because I didn't realize he was going to do it and he was running behind me so I couldn't see him, so I didn't register him letting go, only that suddenly it really felt like I was flying.
I'm signing up for the full pilot package to beginner status - I should be able to do it in a month, and given that I haven't even managed to get a plumber to come to my property and take a look yet, I assume I will be here that long.
Video on Instagram.
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[image error]
comments
Yesterday I had a beach lesson, and took seven instructor-controlled flights (very low, they were literally hanging on to me from the ground) and two solos! Only one crash, plus one failure to launch!
I decided not to mention my two previous lessons, as it's such a tiny amount of experience that I figured it would only confuse their instruction and suck up time while they tried to figure out what I did and didn't already know. The accidental consequence was that I apparently did unusually well for a "first" lesson. That is the first time in my life that has ever happened with a physical skill, so it was gratifying albeit not exactly true. On the plus (and true) side, clearly I learned some stuff from the first two lessons!
The beach site was so much easier than the San Bernardino site. The wind blew in from the ocean, the slope was much gentler (and shorter) which enabled the instructors to physically control a flight, and no matter how far off-course you go, you're still going to be landing on sand.
The first couple flights were fun but not as exhilarating as in San Bernardino, and I couldn't figure out why until my instructor finally let go of my harness and then the I'm FLYYYYING factor instantly returned. It's interesting because I didn't realize he was going to do it and he was running behind me so I couldn't see him, so I didn't register him letting go, only that suddenly it really felt like I was flying.
I'm signing up for the full pilot package to beginner status - I should be able to do it in a month, and given that I haven't even managed to get a plumber to come to my property and take a look yet, I assume I will be here that long.
Video on Instagram.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
comments
March 12, 2023
SF, Fantasy & Horror Book Exchange
![[community profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1497869825i/23063418.png)
sufficiently_advanced_ex
is an exchange for book canons only. The tag set is great, with lots of both popular and very obscure books, from Adrian Tchaikovsky to Nnedi Okorafor to C. L. Moore to Daryl Gregory to Stephen King to Stephen Graham Jones.I will be signing up as soon as I get my letter together and I hope some of you will join me.
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March 10, 2023
Crestline Snowpocalypse continued
Here's a video my friend Tim made of him helping to dig out my car. This was shot over four hours of elapsed time. Before he even started, me and some neighbors had already been digging at that site for days. The video is on YouTube so you should all be able to see it.
Subaru excavation
The LA Times has an article which I have copied in entirety below the cut. Its cheerful tone belies its appalling content. It sounds heartwarming because it's about people helping each other, but it's really about how we got NO help from anyone but private individuals, people died as a result, and the county is actively involved in a cover-up and STILL refusing to help.
During the nearly two weeks he was stranded in his home, Mark Steven Young called about 20 people or agencies to try to get his street plowed and a 6-foot mound of snow cleared from his door.
( Read more... )
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Subaru excavation
The LA Times has an article which I have copied in entirety below the cut. Its cheerful tone belies its appalling content. It sounds heartwarming because it's about people helping each other, but it's really about how we got NO help from anyone but private individuals, people died as a result, and the county is actively involved in a cover-up and STILL refusing to help.
During the nearly two weeks he was stranded in his home, Mark Steven Young called about 20 people or agencies to try to get his street plowed and a 6-foot mound of snow cleared from his door.
( Read more... )
comments
March 9, 2023
How I escaped Crestline, by Rachel Manija Brown (age 49)
A version of this with personal details redacted is up now on Facebook. Please feel free to link to the Facebook version of this post.
I escaped! Now staying with Halle with my cats (in a guest room isolated from her cats). A volunteer in Costa Mesa has my chickens in an absolutely palatial coop – much nicer than mine to be honest – until my temporary coop/run arrives and is installed at Halle’s. I’m assuming I’ll be in LA for 1-2 months though who knows.
Please keep up the pressure to send aid to Crestline and other mountain areas, and have it declared a federal disaster so FEMA can get involved. I checked in with my neighbors this morning and the street is still unplowed, most cars are still buried, a tree is still lying across power lines, another truck is stalled in the middle of the road, and the National Guard is still MIA.
The day before yesterday, well after dark, I heard a car revving and spinning its wheels, and men yelling stuff like “Push! Push!” This went on until after midnight. I couldn’t imagine why anyone had attempted to drive a car at night on an unplowed road.
The next morning, when I went to continue digging out my car, I discovered the reason. A dude in a black ski mask with very poorly cut holes to expose his eyes and mouth approached me with a very incoherent story. Apparently the night before he and his buddies had decided to attempt to drive down my unplowed road with 5 feet of snow and a downed tree precariously resting on power lines, and his truck had crashed into his buddy’s car, and now both were blocking the road.
After some discussion (mostly me saying “What? What do you want me to do?”) wanted me to back my car out so he could use my parking space to back out. I told him he’d need to help me dig my car out. He spent a few minutes poking randomly at the snow with a pickaxe, then wandered off.
My neighbors had already made multiple calls to CHP, with the result that a CHP officer came, ticketed the truck, and left. Now my car was mostly dug out, but my way was blocked by snow and a fallen tree and an electrical hazard on one end, and a crashed car and a stalled truck on the other end.
(The tree on the power lines has been there for five days now. After multiple reports, a So Cal Edison guy showed up and asked several residents for written permission to remove it. That has never come up before – if a tree falls on power lines on a public street, it’s automatically removed because that’s extremely dangerous! He got our signatures and left without doing anything else. That was three days ago and the tree is still there.)
You may recall that two weeks after the disaster, we got texted by the San Bernardino sheriff who advised us to call 911 if we were trapped in our homes and had an emergency. So since CHP had already been called a bunch, I decided to see if it really was possible to make 911 calls from my home. I called 911. I couldn’t get through.
Have you seen the articles about how dead people are starting to get found in their homes? The impossibility of calling 911 if you’re trapped and have no phone service may be a factor there.
At this point I got help from a wildly unexpected source. My parents, who live in a completely different part of California, had called their representative, who dispatched one of her aides to help me out. I explained the situation to him, and asked if he could 1) contact my own representative, Dawn Rowe, himself since her voicemail box is full and not accepting messages, 2) pull strings with CHP to get them to remove the vehicles blocking the road. I pointed out that if anyone on my road had a medical emergency, an ambulance would be unable to reach us. He said he’d contact them both and see if he could pull some strings.
I went back to shoveling, helped by my neighbors. One hour later, CHP showed up, towed the cars, and said if I was ready to leave, they’d escort me to make sure I didn’t get stuck. I said I just needed to get my cats and chickens in the car. (I’d already packed everything else.)
The poor CHP guy then had to stand around while me and my neighbors moved two cats and six chickens through my yard buried in nine feet of snow and down that extremely precarious icy staircase and then over the ten-foot ice wall. It took forever as we kept falling through snow drifts, slipping on ice, etc. By the time they were all in my car, I was filthy and drenched from head to toe. As I have been every time I’ve left my house for the last two weeks, which as you recall has no running water for the entire time.
I was going to go back to get a dry pair of shoes and socks, but the CHP guy said he had to go so it was now or never. I jumped in the car, yelled thanks to the neighbors, and he escorted me out.
(I had flung a lot of food into grocery bags and given them to the neighbors to distribute while the CHP guy was inspecting my car and the road, so at least some of my emergency food supply will be put to use.)
Once I got off my road and onto the 18 (the scary road down the mountain) it was completely clear, dry, and easy to drive. I stopped at a gas station once I was off the hill, stripped in the front seat as they had no bathroom, and changed into dry and slightly less filthy clothes. I’d forgotten to pack any shoes but my favorite fancy sandals, so I drove barefoot to the woman taking in my chickens. She kindly loaned me a pair of furry, leopard skin patterned flip-flops.
And so I arrived at Halle’s place and rushed straight to the shower.
I realize that I am much less newsworthy now that I’m no longer trapped, but everyone else is still trapped and this remains one of the most shocking cases of disaster mismanagement I’ve ever encountered. Please keep up the pressure to declare this a federal disaster, and for the county of San Bernardino to allow help to the mountain.
After I arrived in LA, I got a message from the San Bernardino emergency website I’d contacted to explain that I had no phone or internet at my home, leaving my house was extremely dangerous due to nine foot snow drifts, an icy staircase, and an ice wall on the street, and my car was trapped. It said that it had closed my case as dealing with all of that was my responsibility, and they were not going to provide any help.
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I escaped! Now staying with Halle with my cats (in a guest room isolated from her cats). A volunteer in Costa Mesa has my chickens in an absolutely palatial coop – much nicer than mine to be honest – until my temporary coop/run arrives and is installed at Halle’s. I’m assuming I’ll be in LA for 1-2 months though who knows.
Please keep up the pressure to send aid to Crestline and other mountain areas, and have it declared a federal disaster so FEMA can get involved. I checked in with my neighbors this morning and the street is still unplowed, most cars are still buried, a tree is still lying across power lines, another truck is stalled in the middle of the road, and the National Guard is still MIA.
The day before yesterday, well after dark, I heard a car revving and spinning its wheels, and men yelling stuff like “Push! Push!” This went on until after midnight. I couldn’t imagine why anyone had attempted to drive a car at night on an unplowed road.
The next morning, when I went to continue digging out my car, I discovered the reason. A dude in a black ski mask with very poorly cut holes to expose his eyes and mouth approached me with a very incoherent story. Apparently the night before he and his buddies had decided to attempt to drive down my unplowed road with 5 feet of snow and a downed tree precariously resting on power lines, and his truck had crashed into his buddy’s car, and now both were blocking the road.
After some discussion (mostly me saying “What? What do you want me to do?”) wanted me to back my car out so he could use my parking space to back out. I told him he’d need to help me dig my car out. He spent a few minutes poking randomly at the snow with a pickaxe, then wandered off.
My neighbors had already made multiple calls to CHP, with the result that a CHP officer came, ticketed the truck, and left. Now my car was mostly dug out, but my way was blocked by snow and a fallen tree and an electrical hazard on one end, and a crashed car and a stalled truck on the other end.
(The tree on the power lines has been there for five days now. After multiple reports, a So Cal Edison guy showed up and asked several residents for written permission to remove it. That has never come up before – if a tree falls on power lines on a public street, it’s automatically removed because that’s extremely dangerous! He got our signatures and left without doing anything else. That was three days ago and the tree is still there.)
You may recall that two weeks after the disaster, we got texted by the San Bernardino sheriff who advised us to call 911 if we were trapped in our homes and had an emergency. So since CHP had already been called a bunch, I decided to see if it really was possible to make 911 calls from my home. I called 911. I couldn’t get through.
Have you seen the articles about how dead people are starting to get found in their homes? The impossibility of calling 911 if you’re trapped and have no phone service may be a factor there.
At this point I got help from a wildly unexpected source. My parents, who live in a completely different part of California, had called their representative, who dispatched one of her aides to help me out. I explained the situation to him, and asked if he could 1) contact my own representative, Dawn Rowe, himself since her voicemail box is full and not accepting messages, 2) pull strings with CHP to get them to remove the vehicles blocking the road. I pointed out that if anyone on my road had a medical emergency, an ambulance would be unable to reach us. He said he’d contact them both and see if he could pull some strings.
I went back to shoveling, helped by my neighbors. One hour later, CHP showed up, towed the cars, and said if I was ready to leave, they’d escort me to make sure I didn’t get stuck. I said I just needed to get my cats and chickens in the car. (I’d already packed everything else.)
The poor CHP guy then had to stand around while me and my neighbors moved two cats and six chickens through my yard buried in nine feet of snow and down that extremely precarious icy staircase and then over the ten-foot ice wall. It took forever as we kept falling through snow drifts, slipping on ice, etc. By the time they were all in my car, I was filthy and drenched from head to toe. As I have been every time I’ve left my house for the last two weeks, which as you recall has no running water for the entire time.
I was going to go back to get a dry pair of shoes and socks, but the CHP guy said he had to go so it was now or never. I jumped in the car, yelled thanks to the neighbors, and he escorted me out.
(I had flung a lot of food into grocery bags and given them to the neighbors to distribute while the CHP guy was inspecting my car and the road, so at least some of my emergency food supply will be put to use.)
Once I got off my road and onto the 18 (the scary road down the mountain) it was completely clear, dry, and easy to drive. I stopped at a gas station once I was off the hill, stripped in the front seat as they had no bathroom, and changed into dry and slightly less filthy clothes. I’d forgotten to pack any shoes but my favorite fancy sandals, so I drove barefoot to the woman taking in my chickens. She kindly loaned me a pair of furry, leopard skin patterned flip-flops.
And so I arrived at Halle’s place and rushed straight to the shower.
I realize that I am much less newsworthy now that I’m no longer trapped, but everyone else is still trapped and this remains one of the most shocking cases of disaster mismanagement I’ve ever encountered. Please keep up the pressure to declare this a federal disaster, and for the county of San Bernardino to allow help to the mountain.
After I arrived in LA, I got a message from the San Bernardino emergency website I’d contacted to explain that I had no phone or internet at my home, leaving my house was extremely dangerous due to nine foot snow drifts, an icy staircase, and an ice wall on the street, and my car was trapped. It said that it had closed my case as dealing with all of that was my responsibility, and they were not going to provide any help.
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March 8, 2023
I escaped!
The cats and I are now warm and cozy in LA. The chickens are warm and cozy in a palatial coop in Costa Mesa - I'll collect them when the temporary coop I ordered arrives in LA.
I was so drenched and filthy by the time I got off the mountain that I took off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot on a gas station parking lot because that was cleaner.
How I made it out is a thrilling tale involving tweakers at midnight. I will tell it tomorrow.
comments
I was so drenched and filthy by the time I got off the mountain that I took off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot on a gas station parking lot because that was cleaner.
How I made it out is a thrilling tale involving tweakers at midnight. I will tell it tomorrow.
comments
Please retweet if you have Twitter
https://twitter.com/Rachelphoenix/status/1633485162951639042
There's another tweet with a pic of a tree across power lines that I failed to thread.
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There's another tweet with a pic of a tree across power lines that I failed to thread.
comments
March 7, 2023
Update from this frozen hell
I was on ABC yesterday.
A tree fell on our power lines several days ago and has been on them ever since, leaning precariously. Still no official help on our street.
My rain gutters were ripped off the house from the weight of ice.
Earlier, I dropped my mouthguard (I grind my teeth at night) in the bathtub full of filthy water I use to flush the toilet and had no clean water to wash it with, so I dropped it in a cup of gin for 15 minutes. So that was lovely.
I got multiple offers to foster the chickens off the mountain until the coop in LA arrives and is put together, so I will take them and the cats and drive like a bat out of hell (or rather very carefully) the instant I get my car dug out. Assuming it starts.
comments
A tree fell on our power lines several days ago and has been on them ever since, leaning precariously. Still no official help on our street.
My rain gutters were ripped off the house from the weight of ice.
Earlier, I dropped my mouthguard (I grind my teeth at night) in the bathtub full of filthy water I use to flush the toilet and had no clean water to wash it with, so I dropped it in a cup of gin for 15 minutes. So that was lovely.
I got multiple offers to foster the chickens off the mountain until the coop in LA arrives and is put together, so I will take them and the cats and drive like a bat out of hell (or rather very carefully) the instant I get my car dug out. Assuming it starts.
comments
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