If you were in Humboldt County, you probably remember where you were when the earth shook, early on the morning of 20 December 2022: in bed, sound asleep.
Then, you were awake, perhaps clinging to something; then, the shaking subsided, and the room was a mess. The lights were out. Darkness lay across the land.
If you had serious damage to deal with, you probably didn't go back to sleep for many hours. If you did go back to sleep, then when you awoke you were faced with clearing paths through the wreckage to the bathroom, the kitchen, the front door. Making some sort of breakfast. And then starting the work of putting one's space back in some sort of order.
On the morning of 23 December as we were putting things back in order we spied an envelope on the floor amongst the litter. We turned it over and saw it was addressed to "Alexis".
We recognized the name 'Alexis' 
as being that of our oldest daughter's best friend, from Humboldt County's prestigious Academy of the Redwoods.
Alexis lived in Eureka. Her mother, Patty Valtenbergs, was a teacher, working for Humboldt County. Our daughter had stayed at Alexis Valtenbergs' house, overnight, many times, without problems.
We opened the letter and found ourself reading what claimed to be our daughter's suicide note.
One is tempted to drama. "Oh my GOD! A SUICIDE note!" But drawing upon our decades of human experience, we think that a more nuanced approach is required.
For instance - speaking of drama - this could be a dramatic prop of some sort, that has some sort of meaning in a larger context, that is shared by the two friends.
We had and have never seen our child attempt to hurt herself - none of us, neither parents nor siblings.
Not long before our child had participated in a local science fair and had built her own folding wooden backboard for the exhibit. From somewhere she had acquired a chisel, which she used to do a marvellously fine job of installing hinges. The chisel then returned to wherever it had come from. At no time had we seen our child do anything dangerous with sharp-edged tools.
And yet, according to Humboldt County Child Welfare Services, our daughter was supposedly cutting herself. Where? With what? We saw no cuts or evidence of cuts.
However, after Humboldt County Child Welfare Services took custody of our daughter from us, we learned that there was one of our child's acquaintances who did cut herself - our daughter's best friend, Alexis Valtenbergs.
And yet, it was with Alexis Valtenbergs that Humboldt County Child Welfare Services placed our daughter with - after accusing us of being a threat to our own daughter!
In retrospect, it would seem that it was Humboldt County Child Welfare Services that was careless and abusive; not us.
It gets worse. We later discovered, through our own research, that Alexis Valtenbergs had an older brother - and that her older brother had also attempted suicide. Or, rather, he had died after an unsuccessful attempt, leaving one with the impression that perhaps he had succeeded.
And so we see that Humboldt County Child Welfare Services, while criticizing us for the way we were raising our daughter,
We think that it can be suggested that Humboldt County Child Welfare Services is firmly in the hands of morons without straying too far from the truth.
We think this may be new evidence and grounds for a new trial.
The 'PS' dates the document very clearly as having been created four to six weeks before the events at Academy of the Redwoods led Humboldt County Child Welfare Services and Humboldt County Superior Court to initiate custody proceedings for one child, which mushroomed into custody proceedings for all four children, plus defending ourselves against false charges of child abuse.
Based on information and belief all this behavior - cutting, preoccupation with suicide, etc - began immediately after school started and our child was again in contact with Alexis Valtenbergs, on the grounds of Academy of the Redwoods and, in fact, under the supervision (or not, in our child's case) and in the custody of Fortuna Union High School District personnel.
It is not clear why our wife and ourself were even blamed for events at which we were not present that occurred dozens or (in our wife's case, as she was in the Bay Area, interviewing for a position so that we could move back to the Bay Area) hundreds of miles away.
Therapists don't seem to regard self-cutting behavior as suicidal, per se. They talk about continuums of behavior and about attention-getting mechanisms and about evidence-based medicine and about cognitive patterns of depression. These are all medical issues. Lawyers insinuating themselves into medical situations rarely leads to an improvement in the patient's health. We'll have more to say on this topic, below.
It is no mystery why Alexis Valtenbergs is depressed.
It is no mystery why our daughter was depressed, either. Humboldt County reserved its jobs for locals and their children. There were no employment opportunities for her father - a skilled computer programmer and systems administrator - or mother - who had a degree in finance. That's depressing.
We had just escaped an apartment infested by bedbugs and two or three different kinds of mold - we refer to the notorious 137 12th Street, in Fortuna. That's depressing.
The man living in the apartment above us, at 137 12th Street, had gone insane from all the bedbugs biting him, threatened the entire apartment complex with a .44 Magnum, and caused a 12-unit armed response, in the middle of the Fortuna Rodeo. That's depressing.
Shelters had turned us away because we were more than four people. That's depressing.
DHHS had done nothing about the mold-impregnated apartment. That's depressing.
Your humble editor had been beaten up, on his own doorstep, by the very person who had rented us the bedbug- and mold-infested apartment. The police had done nothing. That's depressing.
Our car's windshield had been smashed with a boulder. Our tires had been slashed. The Fortuna police said it was a civil matter and had occurred on private property. That's depressing.
Honestly, what was there to not be depressed about?
People pretend to be interested in figuring out why teenagers get depressed in Humboldt County but it's all lip service and lies. There's no money for ping-pong or swimming pools or social clubs. It's all being spent on therapeutic pony rides. That's depressing.
We blame Humboldt County Child Welfare Services and The Honorable Judge Christopher Wilson for not being more diligent and discovering, for themselves, that we were, ourselves, a former court-appointed foster parent for the City & County of San Francisco before Judge Wilson fraudulently found us guilty of child abuse ... not after.
(Thanks to Judge Wilson's findng of 'guilty', in his kangaroo court - with no witnesses, no evidence, no jury and no observers - we can no longer be a foster parent. Nor would we want to help Humboldt County Child Welfare Services kidnap children and needlessly, cruelly separate them from their parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents.)
We think that Humboldt County's failure to do the due diligence required suggests that this case may have been given to someone on the staff by some outside agency or third party as a sort of paid "hit job" to destroy our reputation; and the failure to investigate this suggests an abiding awareness on the part of everyone involved, that Humboldt County Child Welfare Services has been politicized, and weaponized.
We personally think this is the conduct of morons and incompetents - not experienced social workers and legal professionals, but poseurs and amateurs, aping the dramas they see on TV and pretending they are adults.
We think that if Humboldt County Child Welfare Services and The Honorable Judge Christopher Wilson had done their jobs correctly and gathered evidence diligently - in search of objective truth rather than acting like a howling mob of monkeys - this evidence would be in their hands - not ours - and we would be unable to wave it under their noses and call them out as bunglers and fools and idiots.
A new trial would give us the opportunity to ask - and answer - many new questions.
Such as:
More to come.