The smoke is almost completely gone from the valley and I was able to see a beautiful sunrise on my drive to work this morning. I worked outside over the weekend and though smoky still, it was much better than previous days. We even managed a little rain on Saturday which was a tremendous help to the air and especially the guys on the front line fighting the fires.
Month: October 2007
Now with real, smoke flavor!!
Eye-watering, lung choking goodness has arrived in Apple Valley. The Santa Ana winds are gone and now the smoke lays down perfectly in our valley. Visibility was less than a mile when I left the house today. Mountains, who needs to see mountains when you can enjoy life inside a smoker. I know the lack of winds is great for the guys fighting the fires and I do wish them the best at the difficult work they do. However, the inundation of smoke in the valley is something I don’t wish to continue for too long. Our towns new motto: “Apple Valley, now with real smoke flavor!“
SoCal is burning!
What do you get when you combine the driest year on record with strong Santa Ana winds? Southern California on fire. When we went to bed last night, there were 10 reported fires in the LA area alone. The canyon where we went to Cornerstone music festival is ablaze near Irvine. Driving in this morning I could see the smoke just over the mountains from our place in Lake Arrowhead. We have avoided being inundated with smoke as the winds are blowing from the deserts into the LA basin, but that can all change before they extinguish all the blazes. I guess we will just pray and see where it goes. It’s always interesting in Southern California. I imagine we will see torrential rains now since these fires are usually followed by mudslides in the burn areas. Such is life in Southern California.
Too blog or not to blog, that is the question.
Some weeks it seems I really don’t have anything to blog about. Chargers beat the Raiders this past weekend so there was reason to be glad in my house. Jesse just finished his first big break since school started and is back at it today. He spent most of the time gaming. No surprise there. Not much else going on.
LANFESTivities!
This past weekend Jesse and I went to the Ontario Convention Center to check out LANFEST 2K7 hosted by NewEgg.com. It was pretty cool to see all of the vendors and the gaming paraphernalia there. I even won a brand new case for my PC from CoolerMaster. I told them of my replacing my power supply the weekend before with one of theirs and they let me spin the prize wheel. We also snagged some shwag from the booths by NVidia, AMD, Crucial, Seagate, Kingston, NewEgg, Shuttle, Antec, Microsoft and Logitech. It was pretty cool to see the gamers compete against each other too with huge Plasma screens mounted above their heads for all to see the action. Not bad for the $5 General Admission fee.
Rock Art
This past weekend we went to Cornerstone California in Irvine and saw some great Christian Metal bands. Friday night we saw Demon Hunter and Tourniquet. Both put on a really great show, but Tourniquet was the best. The next night we saw Neon Cross, Once Dead(formerly Vengeance), Barren Cross and Bloodgood. It was a great time and my neck needed several coats of Icy Hot in the days following. Yesterday, I took Jesse to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena as part of a field trip for his Art class. We enjoyed talking about the artists and their techniques. Today it’s back to work after a 3 day Rock Art weekend.