Sundered

Update the Second: Episode 3 (Prelude the 2nd, Part the 1st) has been recorded and is in post-production. Really. Would I lie to you?

Update: Things were touch-and-go for a while there—especially Sunday night when the fire reversed itself and made a beeline straight for the town—but thanks to some heroics on the part of the firefighters (nearly 800 of them), and the cooler weather on Tuesday, the fire was turned away and at last the mandatory evacuations clearing out so much of my town were lifted. The fog which rolled in in the night has signaled the end of that fire, and none too soon, say I. Please accept my apologies for all these delays—you people deserve a more regular schedule, and I hope to be able to give that to you. Some day. In the meantime, I’ll put the next episode together, and hope that it will be up this weekend. Thanks to everyone who made a comment or sent an email with well-wishing. I really appreciated each one.

The original post:

Well I arrived home yesterday to something like hell.

(View from my backyard Saturday afternoon pointed north toward the San Gabriel mountains)

Reports were lackadaisical. No big deal. Expected containment within 24 hours. Yadda-yadda. Then things turned nasty after nightfall, as the fire turned direction, headed straight toward the foothill town of Sierra Madre:

Nasty. I didn’t sleep for most of the night as the traffic outside my house resembled rush hour, the city in which I live declared a state of emergency, and 300 homes were evacuated.

At the present moment, we are still in an unseasonable heat spell (temperatures are expected to drop 30 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-week), over 400 firefighters and a number of air support are on the scene, more evacuations are anticipated, and ashes are raining down everywhere.

Even if I felt up to recording the next episode, I don’t think that the constant roar of helicopters flying back and forth over my house would permit it. Sorry, guys. I will get the next episode up as soon as this all settles down (let us hope, for so many reasons, that this is sooner rather than later). It’s looking like a three-week gap between episode 2 and 3. That’s quite a spell. Sorry.

I’ll let you all know how things progress.

April 27th, 2008

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