I made a pleasant discovery a couple of days ago -- a two-dvd set from Mike Peters, the old frontman and founding member of the Alarm. Apparently recorded on the twentieth anniversary of the band's formation, it's Mike telling the story of the band from start to finish, with a nifty slideshow and thirty six! songs performed solo acoustic. Yeah, I know -- if you remember the Alarm at all, it's because of their faux Bob Dylan western outfits, their forty foot hair, and the video of "68 Guns." Their music might be a little dated, it's true, but I learned how to play guitar from their first two albums. They showed me that acoustic music can be punk as shit, say something real, and have heart, all at once. Also, they remind me of the bond I had with an old friend, and the music we played together. That friend and I have ideological differences that I think keep us from being too close these days, but we still keep in touch, and I still credit him with shaping much of my musical creative style. We played a lot of Alarm covers those days. When I see Mike Peters…

Well, I've been off work on vacation since the 7th, and tomorrow I return. What did I accomplish this last week? Well. I managed to set up my desktop computer with Linux and Windows 2000 more or less the way I want it -- Linux on the larger hard drive, Windoze on the smaller. I'd be all Linux, all the time, but there are just a couple of things it won't do just yet -- recognize my ancient digital camera, and run most of my audio recording and mixing software. When the Linux community catches up in those regards (or when I buy a better camera...) I'll be the first to jump on board. I want to be rid of Windows. I wrote the next column for Writers Unbound -- it's an ongoing series following my progress as I write a novel called "Brave Men Run." The idea is that writers who are even wetter behind the ears than I can learn from my successes and mistakes... I put most of my collections of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction up on E-Bay, something I'd wanted to do for a while. Bittersweet, deciding…

So it's been a while since I've written much -- since the fires settled down, anyway. I guess I don't have the urge to do reportage, or whatever it was I was doing during that week. So my new magazine is out there. I'm hoping (hint) that some folks will contribute fiction to it for the next issue -- I'd like to reach a point before very long where months go by without a story by yours truly is in there. It's not that I don't want to write -- it's that more people will come to the site if there's a range of writers. I'm not interested in making it a showcase for my own work. This is a poor-ass entry, I know. Mainly, I'm trying to keep in the habit.

We never needed to have left our home. On Halloween night, it rained. It was perfect.

We continue to await the hopefully not inevitable voluntary evacuation notice -- we're still several miles away from the front line of the fire, but the wind is pretty strong, so anything's possible. Those of you who might expect a call, we won't be calling until it's to let you we're leaving... if you don't hear from us, we're fine. I just heard that 90% of the homes in Julian, California, have been lost. Julian is a lovely little town in the high desert of San Diego County, where I had the pleasure of staying a few times. My thoughts go out to the Rockin' R Ranch...

It's pretty creepy up here now. The animals -- we have four cats, a dog, and a turtle -- are getting weirded out. Okay, I don't know about the turtle, but you get the idea. The dog keeps wanting to go outside, where he just walks around and eats grass. The cats are whining. I've got a little air purifier running in the back of the house, cuz that's where I'm hanging out, but the air quality in the front of the house is noticeably worse... every window and door, including the flue of the fireplace, is closed, but the air outside is more smoke than air. There's still no fire in Hesperia. Heh. I said, "Still." There's no indication that there will be, but man, it's a little eerie out there. I've been pretty much stuck in the house (see exceptions in previous entries) and with the stars gone from the sky and the air fouled, I'm feeling a little boxed in. The darn animals are probably getting buggy cuz I'm getting buggy! There's a voluntary evacuation in a neighborhood about five miles southeast of here, and a mandatory evac a bit south of there near the Cajon Pass.…

So I went to get something to eat and the folks ahead of me waiting for a table were evacuees, straight from Big Bear. They were eating because they hadn't had time to get breakfast before they had to leave their house. I was eating because I was tired of being in my house. So I mostly filled up on a plate of perspective... Today's satellite image.

It's the third day in a row that I haven't been able to go to work because of freeway closures related to the fire. I want to make it very very clear: this is not like a vacation! I'm going buggy. I think I'm going to brave the air quality and leave this fortress for ... I dunno, a restaurant, a coffeehouse, something! I gotta get outta here for a while. I wish my laptop wasn't down. I've got website and writing work to do, but I don't think I can sit in my office all day today. I'm gonna stop whining now. My house isn't burning down.

For years, I've been fretting over the ultimate fate of the many cassette tapes I have of music I've recorded either solo or with bands that are now defunct. In many cases, these fragile cassettes are the only recorded history of some interesting times in my life. I fear that if they should be destroyed or deteriorate beyond repair, my own memory will edit the truth and something will be lost. So tonight, I finally started transfering them to digital. Eventually, my entire recorded musical history up to earlier this year will be on one fully-packed MP3 album that I will eventually make available for the price of postage to anyone who wants it. I want to shut the door on all the music I've made up to this year before I start writing new, and performing again. Why? Because all the music I've written to date is either so old it feels like a cover song when I perform it, or the associations I have with the songs are ones I'd rather, well, disassociate myself with! So tonight I started archiving, pretty much at random. I heard the two song demo from 1986 I did with Roger and a…