Cody’s blog

So, I have had an exciting past couple of days. When last I wrote, I mentioned that there appeared to be a big fire down around Rosamond. Turns out it was actually just over the hill from us. Mom and I went into town Monday afternoon for lunch and a bit of shopping, and when we got back, we weren’t home for more than an hour when my neighbor stopped in my driveway to say that we were evacuating, and Mom and I should leave. So I called Mom to tell her to pack up her stuff, and I started throwing things together and packing up the cats, and we headed over to my brother’s place for the night.

It’s very odd, packing for an evacuation. There’s time… but not a whole lot of time. Worry distracts you from remembering everything you might need. Plus, you have no idea what you’re really packing for. An overnight in town? Three days? A week? Forever? Will what you’re packing today be everything you own a few days from now?

You need a change of clothes or two, of course. Toiletries. The cats and their supplies—food and water dishes, litter boxes. Unfortunately, the fish are on their own—I have never been able to figure out a reasonable way to evacuate fish. When I had my big fishies, I used to think I’d take them with me, no matter what. I had visions of filling the 75-gallon tank in the back of the truck, taking along the pump and filter, and setting it up somewhere. Not really realistic. Now that Fred and Bitsy are gone, I don’t fool myself any more. I love my little fishies, and take care of them the best I can, but I don’t love them the way I loved the big fishies. Which is probably just as well, although it makes me kind of sad.

Anyway, after the basic necessities, you also want to grab a few valuables. Me, I bring my laptop, iPod, camera, cell phone, and associated AC adapters and accessories. I still have them all packed up in a backpack, in case the wind changes and we have to head out again. My checkbook and credit cards. A few books.

I look around and think, okay, what would be easy to carry and nice to have if I lose everything else? It’s hard… I have a lot of stuff. But I can’t say that there’s really much I would feel too bad about losing. At least, no one thing that means more to me than all the other piles of things. Money-wise, I’d sure hate to lose the generator and power tools, but I can’t pack up all that stuff and take it with me.

The only really important thing is to make sure Mom and the cats are safe. Everything else must be left to fate, I suppose. It would be nice to have some fire insurance, but I tried to get insurance before and no one would insure me. Because my house is smack in the middle of one of the worst areas of fire danger. Oh well.

So we spent the night at my brother’s. Mom stopped on the way to pick up pizzas, and we sat out on the porch eating pizza and drinking lemonade and it was really quite pleasant. They have some old rabbit hutches out back that they’ve fixed up for the mom cats when they have kittens, so the floors are partly covered with carpets, and I put my three kitties in them. Socks and Jerry shared the big one, and Spot had one of the smaller ones to himself. So they were safe and protected, and I didn’t have to worry about them getting lost or hiding where I couldn’t find them or getting into fights with the other cats and dogs. They weren’t at all happy about it, but they were safe. Socks stayed in her box the whole time (I only have two carriers, so I put Socks in a cardboard box with some little window-holes cut into the sides). Spot ended up sleeping in his litter box—most likely because it was the only thing in the hutch that was familiar to him. Poor guys.

Mom and I slept in the living room, I on the couch and Mom in a rollaway. It was comfortable enough, but between the dogs barking and the clock chiming the hour, I woke up a lot and didn’t get a full night’s sleep. We got up around 6 am and had coffee with John and Jill. It was really very pleasant to get up in the morning and hang out with them. If not for worry about the fire, it would have been a lovely little vacation. I told them I’d borrowed their dog on the Internet, and showed Jill the Dogster page I’d made for Mrs. Beasley. She thought it was pretty good.

Around 8 am, I called the Fire Department to see if they had any news on whether it would be safe to go home. They didn’t really know, but said no evacuation had been officially called for our area. I guess it was our property owners’ association that decided we should evacuate.  Mom and I drove back in her car to check things out. The smoke had gone down considerably, and we could only see a few white plumes behind the hills, so we decided to come home.

I got myself and the kitties home just in time to take a quick shower and head to work, so I didn’t have time to write yesterday. I posted a quick update in my lj and that was it.

Work was the usual Tuesday, busy and full. Along with the usual, I was called upon to catch a lizard that had somehow gotten into the ceiling and was hanging out on top of one of the light panels. I used a ladder to get up to the panel, opened it up and caught the lizard in a towel. I think it must have been pretty weak—Carol said it had been there for a week already—so it wasn’t too hard to catch. Carol and Kris took it out back to turn it loose, while I reattached the panel and put the ladder away. So now I am the official lizard catcher at work. Heh.

Mom came over last night and made dinner for us. I spent the rest of the evening getting ready to evacuate again, if necessary, cleaning up Spot’s carrier and washing his blanket, and getting the suitcase and backpack half-packed so that throwing them together will be short work.

I plan to stop at Kmart after work to get a third carrier, so nobody will have to evacuate in a box. And then we just wait. As of 6:45 pm last night, the fire was 50% contained, and the wind was pushing it east, so we’re okay for now.

For today, since I didn’t post yesterday, here are two pictures. First, a photo I took on Monday just before we evacuated, of one of the helicopters flying overhead, taking water to the fire. The sky behind it is dark with smoke. I posted this one in my lj yesterday.

And here’s one of poor Mr. Spot, huddled in his litter box, with a “Why U Do This?” look on his face.

Well, I haven’t slept in this late in a long time! Not sure why I was so tired, but I guess I needed it, so I didn’t get out of bed until around 9:15.

I had a great run yesterday—it’s so much nicer to do  the long runs in town, on long, straight, flat roads, instead of stumbling around the house on my uneven, rutted, gravelly, dirt driveway. Finished the six miles in an hour and 37 minutes, just over 16 minutes per mile. I think I’ll be doing that for the long runs from now on.

I spent an inordinately long time yesterday laboriously entering all my old marathon training journal entries into my blogspot running blog, backdated to their original posting dates. I used labels on the posts to tag them for which marathon I was training for, and put the labels in my sidebar, so it’s easy to find the journal entries for each marathon. I also included a “Marathon Day” label for the actual race-day reports. Then I deleted the old journals, leaving only the two long marathon reports I’d done as separate pages. I also spent an inordinately long time re-designing the marathon reports, and I’m still not entirely satisfied with them. I’m wishing now I could do them as Pages, the way WordPress lets you do. Oh well. I’m also considering editing them into the journal entries. They’re long, but so what? Hm, I think I’ll do that…. Later….

There was another big fire somewhere yesterday. We could see the smoke-stained clouds in the sky to the south as we were driving to John’s place. I can still see smoke this morning, and I’ve been hearing helicopters all morning. Looks like a big one somewhere down around Rosamond.

In the afternoon, Mom and I went to my brother’s place for a visit. We petted horses (and doggies) and had a nice chat with John and Jill. We both agreed we should do that more often—we don’t see John & Jill often enough, and they live just over the hill.

Other than that, yesterday was kind of a bust. I totally forgot both my usual Sunday chores—cleaning the fish tank and pumping water. I can pump water today, but I think I’ll skip the fish tank this week. Or maybe I’ll do it later. I have a couple of chores to do for Mom: I need to call Suburban to come and fill her propane tank, and fill the gas cans for her generator. Also need to do some grocery shopping. I should do some housecleaning, but I guess that will depend on how much time and energy I have after the rest of the stuff is done.

I don’t know why I keep forgetting to pump water. I haven’t done it on Friday for about three weeks now. The last two weeks I at least remembered to do it on Sunday, but this week, I forgot that as well. I need to start paying more attention to my schedule. Time to start using my organizer again.

I didn’t take any new horse pictures yesterday, but here’s another older one of one of my brother’s horses and her foal.

Six miles today seems sort of momentous, somehow. It’s not really that long—especially not when compared to the full 26.2—but it feels as though I’m finally starting to do “long runs” on the weekend, and not just a bit longer midweek runs. Maybe it’s because I’ve decided to drive to the mailboxes and do my run in town today—it feels more like an event than just falling out my door and running around the house.

I meant to get my waist-pack out and ready, but I didn’t. It should be easy enough to dig up. I think one bottle of water should be enough, but I’ll take extra in the truck. It will probably take me about an hour and forty minutes. Or so. I still wish I were faster, but there you go. It’ll take as long as it takes. It should be more interesting to run on different roads today, anyway.

I’m starting to cool off a little on the iPhone. Spending nearly $600 on tires kind of put a crimp in my spending this month. Well, I’m still waiting to see how much the service plan will cost. It’s not like I have to have it the minute it comes out. I’d like to have it for Las Vegas, if I’m going to get it, but there’s time.

And speaking of Las Vegas, I’m now thinking about getting a foam pad to sleep on, rather than an air bed. It occurs to me that there might not be enough room in the hotel room to blow up a twin-sized bed. A pad, or maybe my old featherbed, or both, would fit in whatever corner I could squeeze into. Well, there’s time to think about that, too.

My blog finally upgraded to 2.2.1 sometime during the day. I’m still waiting for my fic site to do likewise. Maybe I’ll have to go click the upgrade button again. They must have had lots of sites updating.

My mom called me yesterday morning to ask if I wanted to go to the TWEA barrel racing event. So I quick-like finished my breakfast and got dressed, and she picked me up and drove to the ranch where the event was taking place. We chatted briefly with my brother and his wife, watched some of the barrel racing, then came back to town for lunch at Henry’s. She dropped me off at work, then came back to pick me up when my shift was over. It was a pleasant day. There really is time to do stuff in the mornings before work—I tend to think if I’m working in the afternoon, I can’t do much of anything else that day, but actually, I can manage quite a full morning if I want to.

I took some photos of the barrel racing. This is one of the riders coming in from her run.