Here’s a pretty good visual metaphor for my stance re: personal blogging –

It was Sunday, when I was heading home after a few quick errands, that I first noticed the grey haze descending on Mira Mesa. I’ve been Southern California long enough to recognize it for what it was – fire. City officials had been warning people for a few weeks of the extreme fire hazard, but nobody pays attention. Cigarettes are thrown out of windows and camp-fires are lit with no planning, so the fire was no surprise. It wasn’t until I started checking the news feeds that the scale of the flames struck me.

Another goddamn firestorm.

One day later and I’m in North Park, where the air is clean, living out of a bag. There hasn’t been an evacuation of Mira Mesa, but the comunity is right on the edge of areas that have been cleared. I’ve no real worry about the house itself – if the fire manages to get to it, northern San Diego is lost.

The official county feeds are useless. They’re either overwhelmed or behind the news, with the occasional crashes being restored using day-old data. KPBS has been pretty good, but their main transmitter was slagged sometime this morning. 94.9 let KPBS use their frequency, though, so it’s still possible to keep tabs on everything.

Two hours later we were forced to pull off of the 15 and into a Wendy’s parking lot. The engine had been trying to overheat, slowly creeping past 210, 220, inching ever closer to the 300s. We could have kept going, sure — with the windows down and the heater on to pull the excess from the engine, we probably could have made it into Nevada and Utah and Colorado. We weren’t looking forward to it, though. Having the seats drenched in sweat and the outside air more refreshing than the interior wasn’t attractive. Nobody was expecting the trip to be the height of comfort, but the heater on? In the summer? Through the high desert?

Hell no.

We ended up in Clairemont, Dan’s hometown. He never thought he’d be in there again, but circumstances had us driving by his old house, heading for a mechanic that had worked on the jeep before. After a bit of finagling and a few phone calls back and forth and back again, they took a look at the engine. Nothing was wrong, of course. The engine was just old, and had a tendency to work up a bit of a mechanical sweat when pushed. We were offered a new radiator, as large as could be fit inside, in the hope that it would be sufficient to draw away the large amounts of heat generated. So it was that we found ourselves, after having been picked up by one of Steve’s parents, at a nice two or three level home in Sierra Madre. The jeep was going to have the new radiator installed the next morning, after which we could be on our way only a day delayed. Not too bad, especially considering the muggy and uncomfortable alternative.

Then I received a phone call.

It was from a random customer at the store I work part-time at, asking whether or not their envelope to Bolivia was on its way. Being 150 miles away, I of course have no goddamn clue, and try to explain this to the crazy lady on the other end of the line. It turns out that somebody at the store thought it a good idea to just give out my private cell number and let me deal with it, as if I was on call or something. I’m still trying to find out who gave out my number, and my next time sheet is probably going to include some independently billed time.