As you can see, LH, we are fine, but there is still a lot of hot air moving around San Diego.

We drove to dinner last night to friends who live in Rancho Bernardo, an up-to-date suburb north of here, and by making a wrong turn found ourselves in the north edge, where the fires had struck quite hard. You drive through neatly squared off blocks of nice 3- and 4-bedroom ranch style homes, and suddenly you are in the midst of charred ruination, where every third home or every sixth home is just gone, reduced to black streaks of carbon and gray ash, and a mound of skeletal remnant of what was once someone's proud houseful of belongings, there safe center and their fortress. No more. One family was sitting around in the ashes of their vanished house, having a picnic together as they bravely sifted the ashes.

Often it was a complete mystery how one house had come to be unscathed while its neighbor was decimated. One's bushes were carbonized but their roof and walls looked virginal; the neighbor was a pile of cold smoke. Sometimes three out of ten were lost and the rest untouched -- in other blocks it was one of ten that survived.

None of this, however, came down to our part of the world, which is a bit further west and south; so we are fine, thank you.

A