big fire

On Thursday I was in the house "supervising the landscaping workers" (aka doing my pilates workout video and playing peek-a-boo with Daphne) when I looked outside and saw the workers standing around doing nothing. They were all looking towards the east and holding their cell phones up in the air to take pictures of something.

We have seen some strange creatures in our trees, such as an owl and a ring-tailed cat, so I thought they were taking pictures of the latest member of Wild Kingdom to show up in our yard. Then I looked up and saw this....

The apartments on the ridge above our house were blazing! This made my stomach drop because all that separates the apartments from our house is the greenbelt of cedar trees. Just then the doorbell rang and a man told me it would be a good idea to evacuate our house ASAP.

Normally this wouldn't have been very difficult, but if you have been keeping up with my blog you will know that on this particular day I had a baby and FOUR dogs to evacuate. FOUR DOGS!

I ran around like a crazy woman trying to get Daphne and all the dogs and all their gear organized and loaded up. I had to take some extra time to get Daphne dressed because she was only wearing a diaper and I will admit that one of my first thoughts was how trashy we were going to look being interviewed on the news about our house burning down with 4 scruffy dogs and a naked baby.

How did I fit 4 dogs and Daphne and myself into one car, you may ask? I put two dogs in crates in the back cargo area, I tied a third dog in between the crates, I put Daphne's car seat and gear in the back seat, then I tied the remaining dog in the front seat.

I felt like this, minus two people and plus 3 dogs...............

We drove off and I did my best to hunch down and hide from the news cameras filming all along our street.

We went to the Kessler's house for a while, and then the fire appeared to be out so after about an hour we went back home. It took me about 20 minutes to unload the dogs, baby, and all the gear. After we had been home about an hour, I saw the workers standing around looking up at the hill again. You guessed it, the fire was back!

Flames were leaping up again and this time there was smoke coming from the forest. I walked out to the deck and asked the workers if the forest was indeed on fire and they said, "Si!" and started hurriedly gathering up their tools to leave.

I loaded everyone up AGAIN and this time we evacuated to Summer and Matt's house. This time I really thought our house might burn down, so we left the dogs and baby with Matt and Summer went back to the house with me to gather our files and computer hard drive just in case.

To make a long story short, they got the fire under control again and put it out. None of the houses on our street were damaged and everything ended up fine except for the damage to the apartments.

It was an interesting day to say the least, and it really made me think about what was important enough to save in case of a fire. I realized that there isn't much in my house that is irreplaceable. The whole experience made me want to clean out closets and get rid of excess material things because I realize now how little I value most of them. I heard about this guy who writes a blog about trying to reduce the number of possessions he owns down to just 100 items. I can definitely see the appeal of that, but doubt I could get my number that low. Hmmmmm. I think I feel a project coming on...............