Earth, Wind and Fire

Yesterday Eliza's kitchen ceiling had to be torn out to dry because of a leak. We thought our brush with destruction was over, so after making sure they'd be settled and ok, we left. We heard about the fires at home, but had no idea of the degree to which it stood. We got to Vegas and heard that I15 was closed at around 9:30ish, and called my parents on a couple of their phone numbers, but they were busy, so we took our chances and kept on trucking. As soon as we got to Barstow, there were emergency signs everywhere, and at 1 am we ended up getting a hotel room for our family. They were PACKED, and charging 3 times their normal rates for their rooms, just because they could. Karma people...karma.



Anyway, all night we listened to the news and as soon as we heard the pass opened up for a minute, we threw everyone in the car and headed down to our home. We were pretty much the only people heading down there, the freeways were PACKED with people fleeing to safety. My brother and his wife said they were going to Las Vegas because of the fires in San Diego and although their house wasn't in danger, they wanted to get out just to avoid the smoke and craziness. As we pulled closer to our house, we were absolutely shocked. The sky was dark, the wind was gusting to 70 mph and since we live on the bench of the mountain where a large part of the fires is, it literally looked like night time. The smoke is so thick here, it's burning all of our throats. We've been watching the news while the power is flickering off and on, and we're just waiting to figure out what we're doing. I think we'll stay as long as we can, just because we don't want to pay again for hotel rooms for the next however many days, so we'll see! They've just announced a mandatory evacuation for the town that is about 6 miles from our house, so we'll see. Here are some pics from our house for you, and I just wanted to tell everyone who has called and checked on us "thank you". Your concern means more than you know!

Mike, Alli and the kids


Here are some pics from our house so you can see what it looks like. Scary!

Update 2: The Running Springs Fire which is about 5 minutes from our house has just been declared zero percent contained, and Govenor Schwarzenegger just had a live briefing from there ordering evacuations. It is so crazy here. Oh and Mackenzie has been in her room reading the Twilight books, and when her grandma from Utah called, she told them she didn't think there were any fires around us. 10 minutes after she got off the phone with them, she found out that while she was in her room reading all afternoon, they evacuated Mike's mom who lives 3.5 miles from our house. Tiffany and Mike and I were like "what?!? Why did you say that? Are you serious? What do you think those clouds are?" and she said "Rain clouds?" Wouldn't that be nice? Good thing she's not in charge of keeping watch on our family's safety, no?