A smoker’s paradise

The recent wildfires in Southern California must be a smoker’s paradise.  They are the only people who I think would be enjoying the abundance of smoke and ash everywhere.  I certainly don’t!

The Sylmar fire has moved farther up the 14 freeway towards us, and has completely engulfed the east side of the hillside.  It was like driving thru a barren wasteland this morning on my way to work.  And I was actually able to GET to work today since they decided to open the freeways again.

On Saturday, Jeff and I were planning on going into Hollywood to meet up with some friends.  As I leisurely got up that morning, I glanced out the window and saw quite a bit of smoke and fire coming from the hillside.  Hmmm…..that’s pretty close.  We decided to just continue on with our plans and head out to Hollywood.  We left a little early because we figured they may be diverting traffic.

Boy was that an understatement!!!  They had closed off all freeway and side street access out of Santa Clarita.  LOVELY!!!  That’s part of the problem with Santa Clarita….one way in and one way out.  Which is just fine if you don’t need to leave the valley, but we were doing our darnest to try.  Jeff was determined to get out of there though, so we were going to go the long way via the 126 (ie. WAY THE HECK OUT OF THE WAY!!!).  As we sat in stopped traffic forever, I kept telling Jeff that maybe we should do this another day.  He was determined.  All I could think about was my lovely french onion dip sitting in the backseat that was going bad as we sat there figuring out what to do.

We decided to swing thru a drive thru (mmmm…..Jimmy Dean’s!!) to grab some lunch, and thankfully we had Chatty Cathy as our server.  She informed us that all the freeways were shut down, and the 126 that we were planning on taking had an overturned big rig on it.  That was all the encouragement Jeff needed to turn the car around.  So we ate lunch in the car and headed back home.  Thankfully we could still get home.  We can see flames from our livingroom window, so it’s a little unnerving.

We ended up just spending the weekend at home relaxing.  We did have date night on Saturday.  We went out to see Role Models (hysterical!!!) and to dinner.  Then we went home for some more Buzz action on the PS3.  It turned out to be a really nice day.  Jeff and I tend to make everything an adventure and have fun no matter what we’re doing (even sitting in traffic!!!)  Thanks for the fun honey!!