A day in Napa. The community there has been very good to my friends, some of the wineries donating money enough to replace their destroyed car with a new SUV. (Carefully selected for its safety and survival history in terrible accidents. A Chevrolet, it is politically and geographically incorrect, but the people who drive it headlong into an accident will kill the people in the other car without killing themselves. I'm considering a model with a darkroom in the trunk.) It wasn't hard to end run the failed computer drive and restore the data from the backup tape since Brenda's cousin who was in town from Kentucky had already handled it when I arrived. Anyone out there depend on data sitting on a hard drive? I back up my journal every month on a CD, but I store the CD's here at the apartment, so a fire would wipe me out. Of course, in a fire, the data would still exist on my ISP's server and I have another copy on a workstation at the office and, if I really think about it, losing the entire journal might be an excellent opportunity to start over afresh, so I guess I'm OK come the big earthquake that wipes out Oakland and San Francisco as long as I'm sitting safely inside shooting photographs from my brand new gets no miles to the gallon but has a darkroom in the trunk SUV.

Brenda seemed good. They've apparently accepted her into a program in Boston that specializes in advanced treatment for her particular condition with a high rate of success. Everybody's different in how long it takes to recover. I was also wrong (thankfully) about the insurance. They have Kaiser, which wouldn't cover the $15k for the helicopter medivac (without which, of course, they would have died), but they're covering much of the rest. A question for those of us out here who don't drive an SUV: How's your medivac insurance? When's the last time you had your brakes tested? Do the air bags in your car work, or, like me, did air bags not appear in your model until years after you bought it? Thoughts sitting here on an early Sunday evening before going to work tomorrow morning on Martin Luther King Day.