Once I moved out of California, I thought I'd never get the disaster-check call again (or its cousin, the disaster-check email). If you live anyplace where the ground shakes, burns, slides or suddenly becomes a lake, you KNOW what I mean. It's bad enough living in San Francisco and worrying about an earthquake--it's inevitable that someone, somewhere who is related to you will call if the seismograph quivers within 1000 MILES of the Bay Area and asking, "Are you okay?" or, "Did you feel that?". I mean, I appreciate the concern, but a 3.5 quake north of Eureka is not going to register really on a bedrock hill in Cole Valley.
We haven't had to deal with that as much in Boulder. Sure, there are little brushfires here and there, but it's not like someone is going to call and say, "Hey, we saw on the news that there were some clouds spotted over Aurora. Did you experience shade?"
But a few days ago, we had a big fire in the Boulder hills. Not a SoCal inferno, but enough of a blaze to cover a swath of the hillside above Olde Stage Road. Friends were evacuated. Critters got rescued. Houses burned. I came over the crest of Highway 36 on my way home from work and suddenly I was on a Costco run in 1991, rounding a corner on I-80 to see ALL OF THE OAKLAND HILLS turned into the center of hell.
When I started getting calls and emails inquiring about our safety, it dawned on me that unlike the Bay Area or the state of California, Boulder is actually kind of compact. It's entirely possible that if there's a fire in the hills we could be in it. I actually felt kind of bad that I didn't call the folks and let them know that we were safe and sound. So for those of you who haven't already called, I'm not on fire. I'm not even smoldering. We are here in the middle of town respectively playing Wii Fit, sacked out on the couch, reading Fudge-o-Mania with no pants on, and pretending to work. I'll leave it to you to guess who's doing what. But we're just fine. Thanks for asking.
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