Jesusita Fire

Holy cow. There have been a lot of 'firsts' for Axel in the last couple of weeks, not the least of which is his first CA wildfire. If you've been following the news you know Santa Barbara was on fire. Again. Except this time it was a little closer and a little scarier. At the moment we're doing just fine and the worst seems over.

Here's a nice map of the burn area. I tried to add our address as a bullet point, but couldn't figure it out... so if you'd like to see our location relative to the fire put in our address: 622 W Pedregosa St. Not too close, but here's was the view from our patio when Rich decided to hightail it outta there:
Unfortunately we were supposed to sign a lease on a new house that day... but it was in the mandatory evacuation area. We postponed because the leasing agent called to say she could see a wall of flames from where she was going to meet us and thought we should maybe reschedule. Good idea. We did end up signing the lease (yahoo!) and will be moving in a couple of weeks (more on that later).

Another bummer has been the heat. It's tough to convince a baby to take a nap when it's 94 oF in the house, very uncharacteristic for Santa Barbara and a major contributor to the fire situation.
Luckily we have some good friends in Goleta, just north of us that hosted us for two nights. We had dinner out one night eating on the patio of the Hollister Brewing Co where we could see the flames spreading in the hills above us. I think Lucy had the right idea.
Things are calming down a bit now which is a relief and Rich has set about cleaning up the ash that is covering all the outside surfaces of Santa Barbara.


This post was originally going to be about Axel's 3 mo. birthday but the fire has been a bit of a distraction. Luckily we have Grammy daycare for the coming week so we'll be getting caught up with some photos of the little guy, he's getting so much bigger... here's a cute one: