Monday. Lights out early again to awaken at six-twenty, certainly a better time than yesterday's, after a good night's sleep. I think. The two papers delivered on Monday had arrived at the usual earlier time, so I'm thinking yesterday's late delivery, if now the norm, is the norm on just Sundays or the two day weekends. Let's hope.

Up to walk to breakfast, the avocado and cheese omelet, country potatoes, toast, fruit cup and coffee this morning, out the restaurant door and back home by quarter to eight. Everything running along as it should until I looked at the pictures I'd taken with the little V 1 camera that hides fairly easily under my jacket.

The shooting mode had been switched to video and the individual pictures I'd taken had been both saved in jpeg, rather than RAW and the dimensions were in video mode, wider and shorter than in single picture RAW mode. OK, they still worked. Sort of. The camera is small and so it turns out the switches can be moved when rubbing against the coat (or against my fumbling thumbs) and I'm thinking this reaction to the earlier camera theft has totally screwed up my shooting habits. It's the head that's the problem. Clear the head and we can get along again. Now how?

Posted yesterday's entry without checking the display and links before working on today's entry. Discovered errors, all of them memory glitches I've had before, just more of them. Something I can live with, certainly, but it does give pause for what could be coming in the future. I tend to read more newspaper stories about Alzheimer's and the rest of the memory wandering horrors. Well, things to think about, I'm sure it's a question asked by many another.

Later. Looked at the news as I always do after posting to read the reports on as many as ten wild fires up north in wine country. I'd thought I'd smelled a whiff of wood smoke as I was leaving for breakfast and I suspect now that that was what I was smelling, the papers saying people could smell the smoke in San Francisco. I'd been in the Napa fire in the early eighties and remember driving up the highway with all the eastern hills on fire. This one looks much worse with so many homes destroyed, but then again, we've had a long line of major fires in these last three years. Nothing to joke about, the pictures of areas I remember are unsettling.

An hour later having been watching the news coverage of the fire. What they're calling the Atlas Peak fire is burning where we developed our Atlas Peak vineyards in the early eighties and I'm suspecting has destroyed many buildings in the area located up above and north of the Silverado Country club. OK. Closer to home for me, at least.

Later still. A news report the William Hill winery, my old winery, barely avoided burning, the fire stopping just before it reached the building. It's been long enough now that I don't really know what the old winery properties now consist of, the many vineyards and the winery itself, the building constructed off Atlas Peak Road just after I'd left. Others including Chateau St. Jean haven't been so lucky.

Still, Napa is two or three lives ago, and I've had no connection with any of the people I worked with since. Still, something's wrong in how we're handling these fires if they continue to happen.

Evening. Continued listening to the news through seven when I watched another episode of Father Brown. I have no excuse, let alone excuses.