These fires are sooooo crazy ... The entire county is on fire ... with really no progress so far. I was watching the news at 1am Sunday. At that time Ramona was on fire. Ramona is really far from most of the big cities in San Diego. When I woke up at 6 am on Monday morning ... Rancho Bernardo was on fire. Rancho Bernardo is the city 3 exits north of my exit in Mira Mesa. So I knocked on Suzie's door and told her Rancho Bernardo was on fire. We called Ray and Simon and told them they need to pack their cars and evacuate. They packed and came down to our apartment. It took them an hour and 15 mins to come 3 exits South. Then Matt and April came from PQ, and we set up Funks evacuation center. We couldn't go to work ourselves, just in case they evacuated our place. If we left, we would have no way to get back and pack since they were closing the frwys near the evacuation areas. The air and smoke is crazy. We sat in our apartment all day. Windows closed, ac on. All day the news said "Witch fire 0% contained." The fire just keeps spreading with new areas under mandatory evacuation. Today the Harris fire is getting worse too. We watched the news all day ... they evacuated Scrippts Ranch ... which is just on the East side of the 15. We are the first street on the West side of the 15. Then they evacuated everything West of Black Mountain Road ... which is 2-3 streets West of us. Then they evacuated Mira Mar Naval base ... which is directly South of us. They literally formed a circle around us. So finally yesterday at 11:30pm we evacuated since we couldn't sleep knowing everyone around us was on mandatory evacuation. The winds kept changing, so there was no way to predict if we were in the clear or not, and we had already been up all day. I think they were trying to hold off on evacuating us b/c we are right next to Mira Mesa high school which was one of the first evacuation centers filled to capacity. They had hundreds of people set up at Mira Mesa high school. I came up to Cerritos. The national and Los Angeles news is definitely not grasping the affect of these fires on San Diego County. These are not rural cities on fire ... the fires are going all the way to the coast line, to cities like Del Mar, Solana Beach and Rancho San Diego. If your city isn't on evacuation ... its an evacuation center. Packing my car, getting ready to evacuate was so surreal. I've never been thru anything like this. It's times like these I wish I still had my big Explorer. My C350 was definitely not made for an emergency evacuation situation. I packed everything I could fit in my car; all my important documents, computer, clothes, dvds, snowboarding gear, etc. I started driving the 5 frwy hoping it would be open all the way to LA and I could make it up to Cerritos. With the fires in Del Mar and so close to the coastline ... I was worried they might close the 5. Amazingly I hit absolutely no traffic. I guess everyone was headed South into other areas on San Diego to evacuate. San Diego, the Govenator, and California seem to be doing a nice job responding to all the evacuees. The San Diego community has really come together to help evacuees; donating clothes, food, bedding, medicine. CNN is nuts ... they have turned these fires into another political discussion. They were showing aerial photos of the Mount Carmel evacuation center collecting supplies. And the broadcaster says "It's just complete chaos ... people are searching for their belongings with no idea on where anything is." What an idiot. They were sorting out the donations. Their personal belongings are either at home (possibly burned) or in their cars. The local San Diego news is way better than CNN or LA news. So now I don't know what I am going to do. I am safe in Cerritos, but I really want to go back to San Diego tonight and go to work tomorrow. I need my normal lifestyle back. Thankfully most people are safe ... injuries and fatalities have been kept minimal compared to the fires 3 years ago. My prayers go out to all those that have lost homes ... that is completely devastating. | 
