Journal #5174

So on Tuesday afternoon, in the mountains above the city where I reside, a forest fire was either intentionally set by some pyromaniac or accidentally started. Don't know, and I don't really care to look into it. But before today, this fire hadn't effected me at all. The ominous (but at the time meager) cloud of ash and dust lurking above the city was just another part of the scenery so far as I was concerned. Today, however the fire has had quite an effect on my life. The day (or at least a portion of it) will now be retold as best as possible through a series of photos. Lucky I held onto my camera tightly. This was a shot taken from the street my house is on at 3:15 PM. Probably about three hours after I woke up. The smoke was just gradually worsening from the previous days, at this point.A couple shots of the sky at my Dad's apartment. Looked kinda neat at the time (6:20 PM.)Here I'm on the road at 6:50, heading over to my house with my Dad to get a movie or something.This shot was taken from my street right in front of our house at 7:00 PM... Between the trees in the center, you can see little bit of the fire on the mountainside, mostly obscured by smoke.At 7:20 PM, after the brief (and for now, last) visit to our house, my Dad drove me to his office, which is on the waterfront. We left the smoke cloud behind us as we got closer to the ocean.At probably 8:30 PM, while we were at the office, we got a call from my mom telling us that our street had been ordered to evacuate. She'd thrown the important stuff that was ready to be packed, along with our cat, into the back of her car. She drove to my Dad's apartment, nearby but far out of the danger zone. After a couple phone calls, I jumped back into the truck with my dad and we began driving back to his apartment. You can get a pretty good view of the fire in the second to last shot. As we got closer to it, the sky began to darken dramatically, and even though it was still light out it might as well have been midnight. And then out of nowhere...... A massive weight came barralling towards us from behind and pulverized the rear of our truck. I was holding my camera in my hands at the time, set to the video mode, and started recording seconds after we were hit. That'll be fun to watch. The little Nissan Hardbody took it like a champ, but wouldn't start up again after the engine was turned off. The other guy in the little GMC Jimmy took out his radiator in the crash, but drove away with it leaking. We, on the other hand, were completely screwed, and had to walk a mile back to the apartment in the pitch black storm of ash. Might've been comparable to smoking a couple packs. That happend at about 8:51.This here's my backup disk. 320 GB if I remember correctly. The entirety of my computer's hard drives are contained within it, and luckily I had the foresight to throw it into the box of stuff to evacuate with before I left the house. No cables, though.

Hopefully, this'll all blow over, and I'll still have a house on the fourth of July. There were quite a few orange groves between our house and that fire, and last I checked those don't burn too great. If not, well... hey, at least I've got that data there. Too bad my real passion is now a stationary hunk of metal, glass, and rubber sitting out in our garage.