Santa Barbara Snow

"Santa Barbara Snow". I think I invented the phrase, but its probably been used before. Really it refers to a couple things that happened at the same time this week.
First, Anna and I were driving through Cachuma pass late at night and talking to Kevin on the phone and you could see the forest fire up on the hill. What ever forest fire this one was, I don't really know since I have not been at all keeping up with the news lately.
My decline into current event ignorance began as soon as I hit California. I had forgotten how proactive you need to be to stay informed here. In New York, the information jumps out and grabs you and then forces its way into your head through your nostrils simultaneously trying to drill its way into the back of your skull. In California, even LA I'm afraid, the news is a soft breeze mixed with all the other soft breezes you get. Cushioned by fog, smog or both, current events are low contrast mirages that look like they are right in front of you but the closer you get the distance remains. Plus the papers here suck.
We were driving through Cachuma right? Talking to Freeney (Freeny?). I always forget how to spell his last name and he called me on it once. This was after YEARS of friendship. Anyway, talking to Kevin and we kept commenting on how it was a very large, full moon, red because of smoke, floating next to the fire. I think the smoke was doing some optical trick and making the moon look even bigger than most huge, low hanging, full moons. It's thick curtain also made the moon look like it was in front of the mountain. It was spectaculicious (I just came up with that word, but its probably been used before). I thought about how in California even the disasters are beautiful.
Four days, twenty minutes away from Cachuma in Santa Barbara, Victoria Court, dry air, and a wind shift later it starts snowing part one (the best part (not saving it for last)). Light ash falls from the sky at a consistent rate. It reminds me of the snow in Dead or Alive, the video game, that floats oh so slowly and kind of gives the whole scene a weird grain. I went outside to find a good spot to take a picture of how it floats but the flakes are small and so is my mega-pixel count so it doesn't show up.
As I was cruising around trying to figure out how to capture the ashy snow, so I could blog about something, I walked out of our sleepy courtyard where the Ocho is and dead/head-on into Santa Barbara Fiesta in full swing. I haven't liked Fiesta since I got in a fight in the street with a drunken goon squad one late Fiesta night and scraped up my knees so bad I could barely kneel at the altar on my wedding day.
Fiesta is the closest thing Santa Barbara has to the New York News assault. Every local weekly makes it the cover story, its on the buses, newspaper machine dispenser thingies and lots of thrift shops put posters in their windows about it. There are not one, but two parades Fiesta weekend. The main one and a children's parade the next day. I boycotted them both even though I had Sammie with me at the time of the children's parade and she was wearing a pink tutu. I sat through a two hour, paper-mache, hippy solstice parade less than a month ago and that's it, no more Mr. Parade Watcher here.
The snow though, the other snow, that combined with the ash was embedded in Sammie's hair. We both slept in on Friday and she told me about how she ate pizza, burritos, french fries and ice cream with her "uppy" Ben. Plus she "popped a egg". The only slightly fun thing about this Fiesta business is the confetti egg tossing. Everyone gets covered in this confetti and it covers all of State Street. Since Sammie's hair is like mine, it doesn't comb out.
So the blizzard of oh seven ends like this, outside of our sleepy courtyard the streets were covered in confetti and ash. My car looked like it needed to be shoveled by the end of the weekend and the ash is behaving like snow in that it has transitioned into being clear of the pathways and mounding in dirty piles along the sides of walkways, in planters and every crevice and gutter. I haven't run into a big mound of it next to some garbage cans embedded with dog crap like old snow in New York, but I can imagine that exists somewhere.