This has been kind of a stressful morning so far. From 3 am on, Bear’s cell phone would not stop ringing. The power went out at his facility, then they were concerned about how long it would last, then people were calling in saying they couldn’t make it to work, his boss was calling, yadda yadda yadda.
Bear finally just gave up and went in to work, but he called me at 8am to wake me up and told me to pack up the kitties, the scrapbooks, and get out of town.
Fires are raging all around San Diego county. And it’s been so windy that the firefighters can’t fly helicopters over the blaze to fight it. Right now they’re just trying to get people out of the way and hoping that the winds die down soon. And expecting it to burn all the way down to the ocean.
There are mandatory evacuations going on for every town around us but ours, so for now our house is OK, but the air is so bad that I’ve had asthma attacks for the past two days and nosebleeds this morning. What with the kid and all, Bear wanted me to take no chances so he sent me up to his parents where I’m planning to stay for the week.
I am very emotional about the whole thing, though. I went around the house sobbing this morning, thinking about all the work we’ve put into it and how hard we fought to get the house in the first place, as I racked my brain thinking of anything else I had to save (scrapbooks, check. Computer hard drive, check. Important documents, check. Medicines, check. Kitties and paraphenalia, check. Oh CRAP! I just realized I forgot the memory box with my old journals in it! Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please be OK, house.)
I’m sure our house will be OK, right now we’re not in the immediate path of the fire, but the next town over is and who knows what the wind will do. Still, we’re fully insured and we should be just fine. The hardest part is that I’m on my own throughout all this (with some fuzzy help from the cats of course, when they’re not nervous pooping and throwing up all over the car. They are stressed, dudes.), because Bear is at the hospital taking care of everything there. A very selfish part of me wants him to just leave and come take care of me (and more than one of his colleagues *are* staying home today) but he is a compassionate and honorable man and the much much larger portion of me is very proud of him. He’s basically serving as an evacuation shelter for other hospitals in the area that have had to fully evacuate. He is just so very *good*.
So, I’m up at my in-laws, safely out of harms way, but crying at the drop of a hat because I am pregnant and extremely hormonal and away from my rock of a husband and there is the smallest twinge of a chance that our house could burn. But I know I’m completely overreacting because there are hundreds of thousands of people who had to be pulled from their beds in the middle of the night, and I just ran away from the poor air quality. Bear’s cousin Sarah lives two towns over and she got pulled from her home this morning with her three small children, and they had to leave without so much as her wedding ring. We just got news that the fire is across the street from her house. So I’m trying to stay calm and praying for Sarah and giving thanks that I had somewhere to go.