It's been quite hot in the last few days. Hot for the San Francisco Bay Area is about 80-90 degrees Fahrenheit. The East Bay (past the Oakland Hills) is about 5 degrees hotter. Sacramento, which is the San Joaquin Valley, is another 5 degrees hotter still.

I don't remember the weather in Peru. I don't think it was particularly hot nor particularly cold. Lima is on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, which moderates the tempertature. Christmas was during the summer, when school was out.

Ten years spent living in Sacramento go me used to some temperature extremes. Summers went up to the 100's regularly. Winters went down to the 30's. This is California, where the weather is quite good throughout the state, but Sacramento is in the interior so a bit more extreme than usual.

Contrast this with San Francisco, where even in summer the temperature rarely gets past 70 degrees. It doesn't freeze during the winter, since the city is sorrounded by water on three sides. But it's always on cold side, with fog and wind common.

The first year of school in Berkeley was a record cold snap. Temperatures were low, with high and cold winds. I remember being very cold that year, always wearing a jacket or sweater. Didn't rain much though, it was just a permanent cold front.

Right after that was the drought. Eventually it lasted I think seven years with very little rain. Water reserves ran dangerously low. Rationing was instituted in many areas of California, although not Sacramento. Few houses in Sacramento have water meters, so you can't tell how much water people are using.

There was criticism in the Bay Area about the water usage in Sacramento, which was estimated to be almost twice the average. Lawns take a lot of water. But there was a lot of voluntary water conservation in Sacramento. We did our part, perhaps not as big as others, but hard to tell in any event.

Other noticeable changes were that restaurants stopped serving water unless asked. People put bricks in their toilets. Water the lawn every other day instead of every day. Big effect on farmers, who use half the water in the state. It's easy to cut back on their water supply since they don't have as much political power.

Southern California was even worse, as Los Angeles is built in the middle of a desert. A canal diverts a lot of water to Los Angeles from Northern California. During the drought this became a fair point of contention. Los Angeles hadn't really started to institute water conservation, it was mostly Northern Californians who were responsibly conserving water.

There was talk of secession -- splitting up California into two or three states. I don't think that was ever put to vote. And we would have lost anyway, since the bulk of the population is in Southern California.

As a result, there is some hard feelings at Southern Californians on the part of the Northerners. The people I've talked to from Los Angeles don't even know about this, although a lot of Northern Californians would know what I'm talking about. Now that there's plenty of water, this little rift has died down.