A bit of a life post. A rather belated one at that, but holidays and life events do often get in the way of writing things down immediately.
But in early December 2017, you may have heard in the news that the Los Angeles area was hit by a large number of wildfires virtually overnight. In the passing weeks, more continue to start, due to our extremely dry conditions (it literally hasn’t rained here in months) and very high winds of late.
I am happy to report my husband, house, and myself are all fine, and were never in any serious danger. We are fortunate enough to be in an area not directly affected or nearby. However, my work place was slightly different story. I was able to see not only a huge plume of smoke that nearly overtook the entire sky, but actual flames on a nearby hillside from my office window. Needless to say, we were evacuated. But since it’s a large workplace, it was hastily done on outsourced buses, and we had to leave our own cars behind.
Luckily, my husband was able to pick me up from the evacuation center, but getting my car back was a bit of an ordeal, as the entire area around my workplace has become an evacuation zone. Police were generally not allowing people back in the area. My husband is extremely adept at finding alternate side street routes, and we were eventually able to get back long enough to retrieve my car. Good thing, too… my work ended up being called off for the next five days.
As far as I know, while a few co-workers were evacuated from their homes, no one that I’m aware of lost their homes–so that’s good news. And I did manage to enjoy some unexpected time off, which was fairly nice in it’s own way. We did have to endure quite a bit of smoke from all these fires, even though we weren’t close to them… that’s how severe it all was. But given how much others had to endure, we weren’t complaining much. That said, one of those days off I traveled an hour south of all the fires, and the smoke could still be smelled in the air.
Of course, when we finally did get to return to work, we basically had to cram in two week’s worth of work into one, so it was really frantic. Plus, I had also gotten a bit sick (perhaps not surprising with the air quality). So it’s been kinda rough personally lately. But just happy to now be on the other side of it, and wishing the best to all who have been affected.
By now, most of the fires are done, but even now, one of them (the Thomas fire) continues to burn. Yes, nearly a month later.
