Hi All,

I've seen this happen before, so its truly not rare, but so many people I spoke to today were in some kind of a bad mood. Rather like people with the one last nerve thing going on. We've had a rather long heat spell here in the Bay Area where its up around the 90's for the past three weeks and that could be it, or an earthquake brewing, or possibly these people are being influenced by the slow frustrating path of Hurricane Ivan? I hate to say it, but its all to easy to get drawn into these events when the media spends a lot of time on them and suddenly we have a mood because of it.

Mind you, the hurricane season this year has been a bad one. Even worse, the tornados that spawn because of them. I heard the largest number of tornados ever generated from a hurricane happened with Hurricane Frances. It was over 90. I doubt things will look much better once Ivan comes ashore.

I'm glad too that Chris writes more here when writing is papers too. Is our Chris going to AGU in December in San Francisco? I checked on my vacation days left for the year today and surprisingly, there are enough left for AGU...so I'll be there again this year.

But tomorrow I'm going to fulfill a very long time wish. Years ago when they would do shows on TV about Habitat for Humanity I always wished they would do projects in my area so I could volunteer. Well, they have and tomorrow morning, bright and early at 7AM, I'll be at someone's old house with a crew painting the interior. I absolutely love to paint, and our CEO at work has afforded all of us 4 paid days a year to get out and make life better for someone else. It couldn't get any better than that. A definite stress buster.

Perhaps this year is our year to learn about preparedness in real time. For the first time ever, Californian's had the opportunity to think about earthquake preparedness. Yet many people were sent out of their communities in Florida only to find nothing happened and now others are doing the best they can knowing something is going to happen. It won't be good, but I hope the outcome is better than expected.

Meanwhile, things are picking up generally all over California with the most 3.0 quakes in the past month than I think we had all of last year.

Petra