It’s been a strange, horrible day. We’re safe and watching our city burn through the eyes of local news coverage. They’ve reported 300,000 people evacuated so far and the fires aren’t the least bit contained. San Diego is burning. My school is closed and will remain so at least through Tuesday (it’s Monday night, technically Tuesday morning as I write this) and Christy was off today as well. She compared it to a snow day: you don’t have to go to work but you also can’t really do anything. Our part of the city is remarkably normal; just quieter than usual as we all hunker down, stay off the highways, and avoid using cell phones while we watch TV. A short, twenty or thirty minute drive away, the Witch Creek fire blazes on. People are evacuating to Qualcomm Stadium, just down the road from us. The TV tells us the chaos is everywhere but other than the smell of smoke in the air most of today was just a normal, beautiful (if hazy) San Diego day. Only in the past few minutes have I seen the fire crest over mountains in the distance. At first it seemed a bright orange sunrise lighting up the horizon six hours too soon. Now it looks like lava coming down from a volcano or beacon fires lit in desperation.

It’s hard to know what to think or how to feel. I’m staying up late to make sure the Witch Creek fire doesn’t decide to head south, nor the Harris fire head north or west, and Christy will be up early tomorrow to check the news and make sure we don’t have to leave. Frankly, if the fire reaches us I’m not sure which way will be left to go. We don’t have a landline, so the “reverse 911” calls they’re making won’t reach us, and while we presume we’d hear if they started to evacuate our area, it’s easy to justify watching even more news. We have some supplies in the car already and some bags ready to go if we need to, but we expect that we’ll be just fine. Happy to be renting instead of owning, but happiest to be safe so far. Our sympathies and prayers are with the hundreds of thousands of our neighbors camping out, wondering about their homes and lives. Stay safe out there.