Fire!
Wow! Things are really smokin’ out here. I had a crazy good weekend in LA. On Saturday we went to Huntington Gardens in Pasedena. It’s huge. There were, of course, lots of open fields, huge trees, waterfalls, and ponds as well as themed gardens like the desert garden, the rose garden, and the Japanese garden. The desert garden had just a bunch of cacti and yucca and this one hairy looking cactus. It was funny and we named it the Dr. Seuss cactus. Then we walked around old town Pasedena shopping and people watching. We had a late lunch/early dinner at The Cheesecake Factory-it was awesome as usual. On Sunday we looked at model homes in Valencia (I love that name, it always reminds me of big voluptuous oranges) and all day we were watching the smoke getting bigger and bigger on a nearby mountain. Around 3 we decided to head back down to San Diego and started out for the freeway via a back mountain road. Traffic going the opposite direction was bumper to bumper and we just thought that there were a lot of people that go to the mountains on the weekend and we were glad we weren’t going that way. Then we wised up and called Tiph and she told us the freeway was closed because of the fires. So we turned around:( It took us thirty minutes to get one way and and hour and a half to get back to where we started. The drive down was pretty scary. We didn’t know where the fires were or if the route we were planning to take would be shut down. When we finally did get home we could see the fires from the apartment complex. We’re not worried about our apartment burning down because we’re in the middle of a bunch of residential so for the fire to get to us it would have to go through all that and I think the firefighters would really make a stand. So many houses have burned already and people have died in the fires. The big worry for us is air quality. There’s a fine layer of ash on everything outside and the sky has been a twilight zone yellow making the sun appear a dull flat dot. “Extremely Hazardous” is the term the newspaper used. What San Diego could really use is a bunch of rain.
So with freeways getting closed down and all the smoke it really prohibits where I want to go-like the grocery store. There are a couple stores in Rancho Bernardo but those are the striking stores so I can’t go there and the other stores are down the freeway. There’s a little store in town but it doesn’t have all the stuff I’m starting to need. The other night I had a dream that I went to the grocery store and bought everything I wanted, I spent $200 and put it all on my EBT card. So in my dream I was on welfare and I was buying all this stuff and it was sorta free. Now I know the strike is getting to me.