Firehazard!

After spending a leisurely day on Saturday checking out a few of San Diego's many suburbs to scope out potential areas for future house-buying, we felt even more comfortable and excited by our new surroundings. We were also pretty beat due to a lunch margaritas and morning dips in the pool and hot tub. So, we headed home to chill out and discuss our shared enthusiasm for the neighborhoods that we just explored. We had heard on the news that there were some fires in the east, but this was nothing new and relatively small at the time. We had heard of fires in the state pretty regularly over the last several weeks since moving here. On Sunday morning, Jason was focused on making a comeback with both fantasy football teams (he had 50% success, with a loss in the second league by 1 point - typical of Jason's 2007 fantasy sports luck). I was doing a million things around the house and hadn't left except for a morning run to Starbucks. We still didn't realize the scope, mainly because we Tivo everything and never watch the news.

Anyway, late in the afternoon we walked out to the deck to get some fresh air. Unfortunately, the air was anything but fresh. I asked why it was so hazy, since we are used to bright blue skies. I thought it was just overcast or maybe some of LA's smog had reached us. Of course after taking a few whiffs of the air, it was reminiscent of many a college bond fire. This is when I realized that the sky and horizon wasn't overcast, it was filled with smoke. At this point we turned on the news to realize that the fires had spread due to the high heat, low humidity and extremely powerful Santa Ana winds. The next morning (Monday), we were woken up by a call from Jason's boss. She said that the office would be closed and asked Jason to contact his teams to spread the word. We later found out that some of his team had already been evacuated. From there, we realized just how bad it was.

Here is a link to the map shown on our local news indicating the fire zones: http://www.signonsandiego.com/firemap/

Long story short, early Tuesday, about 500 homes have burned and I think about 500,000 people evacuated from these areas in San Diego county. We feel so lucky to be living downtown and close to the water. Of course, looking at the map, our evacuation would seem to involve asylum in Mexico (yikes!) or floating on a raft in San Diego bay. After finally agreeing on a move to San Diego, we are hoping that our stay will be longer than two months :). Otherwise, we are going to need another decade or so to agree on another city and come to a compromise - although, we both really like Aruba. Even though everything we have encountered here so far has been on the bad luck side, we do feel very lucky to be outside the fire's path and are trying to do what we can to help out others during this crisis.

Anyway, just to let everyone know that we are safe and well. We are pretty much hunkered down and keeping an eye on any new developments. The air quality is pretty poor, so it's not a good idea to be outside too much right now. So, of course, we did just that and ventured out to La Jolla (San Diego's mini Bev Hills) to see what it was like near Jason's work (and get some must have sushi - although we had to settle for Red Robin, since Sushi Edo was closed). The air was markedly worse in La Jolla and so we held our breath and closed our eyes (our eyes burned a little) as we walked through the parking lot. We are expecting about the same tomorrow, although things are slowly improving (so they say). The Santa Ana's have died down, and we have more support due to state of emergency status. We even had our first Schwarzenegger press conference, which was pretty weird. I could hear Arnold repeat the word "California" all day! Gotta to give it up to Arnold and Cali, though, - they know how to handle natural disasters in this state. Guess they've had some practice. Well, if Nostradamus got it wrong and the "big one" doesn't hit next week, we look forward to seeing you all soon - here or where you are. We miss you all!