The fires, at least the ones that were near me, are out or under control. Some of the fire to the north still burns, and still threatens structures in some places, but the 24 hour news coverage, thankfully, went away days ago. In my neck of the woods, we had one day of bad smoke, with a small amount of ash fall. We were fine the rest of the time. Tuesday night, we were unable to play racquetball because all the places we could play were closed. That night was the creepiest, because I could see the fire's red glow beyond the ridge line to the south of me. Everything was back open by the time we went to play Friday night, though. The above photo was taken Wednesday morning from work, after the winds changed, bringing the smoke towards us. Here's the view from the alley behind my apartment. The first photo looks north, showing a brown haze hugging the horizon.

The next photo looks south, showing a brown cloud bank that is actually smoke from the nearer fire.

It smelled, too. The major fire to the North was called the “Witch Fire”, so named after its origin, Witch Creek. I suggested to a friend that a timely and humorous Halloween costume might be to dress as a witch on fire, and thus, the Witch Fire. Aren't I clever?

NaNoWriMo starts Thursday! I am daunted! I am whelmed! I'm going to do it! Since the number of votes and suggestions on my story ideas were underwhelming, I've just shunned everyone's opinion and am going with idea #1, the South America adventure story. It was tied for the most votes, too, with (drum roll)… 2! So there you have it. My first, frantic, awful novel is in the pot simmering. There probably won't be many posts here during November, other than novel posts. I have no shame, so I'll probably share what I've written on here every week or so. You can follow along the horrendousness that will be my novel.

Like clockwork, 4 years to the week after huge portions of San Diego
county burned up in a series of wildfires, it's happening again. Once
again, I'm in La Mesa, and once again, my home is not directly
threatened. So far, from my vantage point, it's not yet as bad as the
last time. 4 years ago, there was an ash fall by day 2 that turned the
sky orange, and covered everything. So far no ash at my house, but the
sky is starting to turn orange. Massive smoke clouds can be seen to the
south, and brown haze can be seen to the north. The North fires are
much worse, but much farther away. The South fires aren't threatening
much civilization as of yet. They are both far enough away from me that
only the worst catastrophic burning could bring them to my doorstep.

Over
the weekend, it was my brother's birthday. So, we all gathered in Las
Vegas to celebrate. My mother flew in, my brother and his wife were
there, my brother's wife's parents were there. And my dad and I drove
up from his place in Arizona for the day. I both like and dislike my
dad's place in Arizona. It's relatively secluded, in some lovely
mountains, with bright stars and not a great many people, which is
good. It's in the Mojave desert, in a tourist attraction, is very hot,
is very far away from any stores or restaurants (which isn't normally
bad, but my dad never has food in his house, so…), and has several
inconveniences. Now, his place is still a palace compared to most of
the living situations I saw in Peru. My dad has an innate talent for
making things far more complicated than they have to be, and his house
fits him to a T. There's a particular way to flush the toilet, hot
water heaters and gas valves have to be turned on and off with each
use, and the substandard, old, and half broken septic tank has to be
monitored constantly for leaking. Other than that, its a cute little
mountain/desert cabin, that was once a mining shanty.

I took
the scenic route to my dad's place on Friday, which also has the added
benefit of being very lightly traveled, so no traffic problems were
encountered. I stopped at the imperial desert dunes, again, to get
better panoramas of the dunes.

I
needed more fuel for my photo stitching addiction. When I got to
Oatman, AZ, I was just in time to grab a quick buffalo burger dinner
from the Oatman hotel restaurant, before they closed at 6:30pm. I tried
to get a panoramic of downtown Oatman with the sunset-lit mountains in
the background, but my software seems to get really confused with
panoramas taken with the camera tilted 90 degrees. So they didn't turn
out. Here's a shot of the downtown area, though.

Incidentally, Oatman's main street is historic Route 66.

That
night, my Dad and I got into one of our seemingly unavoidable debates.
He has become a fundamentalist Christian, and seems determined to
convince me that evolution is wrong and that literal biblical
creationism is the way to go. Sorry dad, you're not going to get me to
agree with you there. His main point of reasoning was that
evolutionists were atheists, so he couldn't believe a theory that was
used to say that god didn't do something. Well, in my opinion,
something can be learned from everyone. If your faith is strong enough,
you can take what makes sense to you from evolutionary theory, and
simply disregard any direct, implicit statements absolving god of
responsibility. To me, it's easier to believe in a god that had such
tremendous foresight, that he could start with a puddle of primordial
ooze, and set in motion a chain of events across billions of years that
would ultimately lead to creatures in his image. My dad countered with
the stuff about 7 day creation yadda yadda, and I said, “God is
timeless, billions of years are a blink of an eye to him, so 7 days to
him must be a long time indeed”. Besides, a day is the period of one
full rotation of the earth, why would god be bound by such mundane time
measurements? He said God was too loving to make a fish suffer out of
water long enough to develop legs and lungs, I countered with the fact
that whales and dolphins are mammals that adapted to live in the sea,
why would the other way around be so difficult. He said whales and
dolphins were created to live in the sea, and I said how is it not
cruel to place air breathers underwater? Is that kinder than placing
gill breathers on land part time? What about other sea going non-fish,
like penguins, seal, etc? They don't have much trouble adapting to
part-time aquatic life. So what's the hangup?

We'll just have to agree to disagree.
But, my dad does have a lovely view. Here's what he sees out his backyard.

Vegas
was uneventful. We went to the Carnival World Buffet, which is famous
for being the best in Vegas. It was yummy. My brother had a tooth
break, and had to skip his own birthday lunch to go to a dentist. What
a shame. He did go to dinner with us, later on. I gambled a little. I
lost 20 dollars, then won it back, then called it quits. Then we headed
back to Oatman for the night. Sunday morning, my dad made chili, one of
the only things he can cook. He accidentally used the “HOT” chili mix,
which made it very difficult to eat. I didn't have the heart to not eat
it, so I soldiered through it. It wasn't that bad, I just had to go
slow. Later, we went to town so he could do one of his gunfights. He's
a member of the “Ghost Riders”, a group that entertains tourists by
staging comedic wild west shows at tourist stops. I'm sure you've seen
their like. He really enjoys it, and has some good shticks of his own,
such as his “arthritic fall” where he takes forever to fall down after
being shot, and his “poof rounds” where he only half loads his black
powder pistol so that it goes “poof” instead of “bang”. That town is
exactly what my dad needs at this stage of his life. After a lunch, I
decided to hit the road home. My dad, bless his heart, was visibly
disappointed that I was leaving, when he knew I had the next day off,
and could stay another night if I wanted to. But, it's a real good
thing I left when I did. I barely got back into San Diego before they
closed down the interstate due to the fires. I did pass through a great
deal of smoke, and actually drove around one area hunting for an open
gas station that has since been burned. Weird.

On my way out
of Oatman, I got one more Panorama of Boundary Cone Mountain, so named
because of it's cone shape, and the fact that it originally marked the
border between California and Arizona, now some 30 miles west.

That's Route 66 in the foreground.