The Agrinautica

   In other bee related news, you may or may not recall that at Bee Busters we had decided to return to the beekeeping business. After I had left for the law mines they did indeed get their hives set up and filled with bees ... in Santiago Canyon.
   A week later, the Santiago Canyon Fire burned 28,445 acres over the course of two and a half weeks (only becoming fully contained last Friday).
   Oops.

   No one's been up there to check it out yet (the area is still closed to nonresidents I think), but the house next to them has survived so we're optimistic the bees are still there.


   In other news, my phone does this thing where it starts ringing, says private number on the caller ID, and when I answer it I hear ringing on the end as if I called someone. Once I stayed on and my friend Courtney Caruso answered as if I had called her, and there was much confusion and awkwardness regarding who called who. To avoid this awkwardness I now immediately hang up when I answer and hear ringing.
   Anyway, it did this a few times last summer, and then didn't do it again until just the other day it started doing it again. Around the middle of the day it'll happen every five minutes for awhile, and then stop until around mid-day the next day.
   Founder of the Davis College Republicans, Chris Mays, left me a voicemail after one of them, sounding confused saying "um.. I just answered the phone and.. um, apparently I called you? So, um.. I guess I wanted to say hi?"
   Maybe my phone is trying to tell me somehting, like if I answered and spoke to Chris we would go on to solve unsolved crimes or something.


   Also, the University of Puerto Rico School of Law costs about a 6th of most other law schools and has a pretty good bar passage rate (66% compared with the overall average of 46% Puerto Rican bar passage rate) ... and, of course, don't forget, that Puerto Rico IS part of the United States.
   U of Puerto Rico, a brilliant idea, or a the opposite of brilliant idea?

   Apparently we're already in the biggest evacuation in the history of California, and as I mentioned yesterday, we're a designated Federal Disaster Zone. The Santiago Fire is about six miles away I think, and I can clearly see the flames from my street. Yesterday morning it was "30% contained," but then in the afternoon it jumped a road they hadn't expected it to be able to cross, so who knows how contained it is now.

   I can understand having volunteers who don't know what they're doing involved could be more of a logistical problem than benefit, but it seems like they could put volunteer brigades to work hacking firebreaks where they're not in the way of the real firemen. I'd be all about it. d=