Well, we survived the Jesusita Fire with our house still standing. But damn, it was close. The fire burned to just a few hundred feet of our house, almost to the lot at the end of our road. If the dry brush in that lot had caught fire, it’d be a different story today.

It’s been a rough week. We were convinced on Wednesday that our house was gone. From my dad’s house we watched the TV news as it showed our neighborhood and surrounding hills on fire, with flames as high as 150 feet. I thought there’d be no way our house could still stand after that.

Then at about 4am on Thursday I couldn’t sleep, and I just had to know if the house was okay. I remembered that I had left a computer in the garage powered on and connected to the Internet. I tried connecting to it from my iPhone, fully expecting to get a “connection timed out” message, but lo and behold — it answered! That meant at least the garage was still standing and the power was still on! (Either that, or the computer had become sentient and absorbed by the Internet in a Lawnmower Man-esque fashion.)

We were allowed back home today, so we checked for any damage (none, thankfully) and then hiked to the empty lot to see how close the fire had come. The view from the ridge was spooky — everything was burned black as far as we could see. A few houses still stood, but the ground was scorched all around them. Clearly the firefighters had made a stand to save the houses. We could see where they made their break and held the line, which kept the fire from coming any further. They did a hell of a job, bless ‘em.

Looking back, I have to say that at times our local news media did a relatively piss-poor job of covering this disaster. More often than not, the local TV station KEYT would opt to air their regular daytime soap operas instead of providing the news about the fire that all of us were so desperately seeking. And when they were providing coverage, often times they were showing live feeds of houses burning or giant flames, but couldn’t tell us what area of town we were looking at. Or they’d leave the camera on a single burning home for twenty minutes, explaining that the fire was coming out of the windows and doors and roof. No kidding, really? Is that how fire works? And in between broadcasts they’d play El Pollo Loco commercials boasting that it was time to “taste the real fire”. Nice going, dipshits.

The local radio stations were not much better, often playing Dr. Laura or classic rock when they should have been giving round-the-clock coverage. I mean, seriously guys, the goddamn city is on fire, do we really need to hear Jethro Tull right now? As I said the other day, the best source of news about the fire was from Twitter.

Anyway, our house is still technically in a warning zone and everything is covered in a fine layer of dark gray ash, but tomorrow I go back to work and hopefully life will carry on as normal. Whatever that means.

We are evacuated and hanging out with family.

Meantime, cows wander through the streets as people try to flee. It’s chaos.

It’s warm and windy in Santa Barbara, so of course there’s a fire in the foothills above town. Why wouldn’t there be?

It started yesterday afternoon. This time it’s called the Jesusita Fire, apparently named after the little girl Jesus. So far it’s burned about 200 acres and is nowhere near being contained. Surprisingly, I’ve found that the most current information about the fire can be found on Twitter, of all places. Some of it is accurate and some of it is wild speculation, but at least it’s up-to-date speculation, which is more than I can say for what our local news is providing.

And of course, it takes one Twitter message like this:

To turn it into this:

Anyway, the fire is pretty darn close to our house and we’re on the border of the evacuation area, but nobody’s asked us to leave yet. So we’re still preparing. To confront Jesus, I guess.

Last night was among the best evenings of the year for novice star gazers. Hopefully you caught a glimpse of it. If not, here’s the next best thing.

(stolen from David Powdrell)

It was raining really hard yesterday, and when the clouds parted we could see some snow up on the mountains by our house. Taking a chance that it wouldn’t melt quickly, we packed the kids in the car and headed up to Figueroa mountain. There was plenty at the top. We found a nice, level spot where there was lots of untouched snow. Many snowballs were thrown, and the kids made a snowman they named Mr. Angry Eyes.

Snow is such a gift here in Santa Barbara. We only get it once a year in the mountains if we’re lucky, so I’m glad we got a chance to go up this year.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Tonight, Jupiter and Venus are in conjunction in the southwestern sky, and it’s neat to behold. The two planets look like bright stars, unless you know the difference (planets do not ‘twinkle’) and the moon is just a sliver in the night.

Between Venus and Jupiter, Venus is the brighter planet and will remain high up on the skyline all throughout the month of December. Jupiter, on the other hand, will be descending on the western horizon in December. Just before the month ends, we’ll be able to see a fleeting Mercury accompany Jupiter at dusk. Venus will still be visible, but somewhere above the conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury.

The full moon on December 12 will be the closest to Earth since 1993, and won’t be coming this close again until 2016.

Click below for a bigger, blurry picture:

(First photo stolen from Betsy Cramer, the second one is mine.)

(Pictures stolen from Dan Siebert.)

A fast moving brush fire has started in the hills above Montecito. I left work at SBCC shortly after it started and the huge flames were very visible from the east campus. It looked really bad.

Apparently downtown traffic is really screwed up, there’s a major power outage, and people are already losing their homes in the blaze. Spot fires on Westmont campus are being reported. Major evacuations are underway.

They’re calling it the “Tea Fire” for some reason. I heard that they think it started above the Tea House structure on Westmont Campus, but that’s really no excuse for giving the fire such a ridiculous name. That’s just lazy… if anything, they should have called it the Tea House Fire. The local media really like to dumb things down.

(Pictures stolen from Lisa Slavid via EdHat.)