It's that time again...

Time to pull out the thin sweaters, there's a minor chill to the air in California! Oh, and Halloween is coming too. Bronson loves his pumpkin sweater and insisted Edmund get one too. He wants them both to wear them all the time. He either is wearing the pumpkin sweater or no shirt at all.... a nifty little trick he picked up from some boys at daycare.

In other news Matthew is back from South Africa, he had a wonderful 2 week trip and the boys enjoyed daycare at Aunty Moo's and mom enjoyed a coffee by herself one day after work. Matt particularly liked Cape Town and would be for us moving there for a post-doc.

We are up in Owens Valley for a few days, about to head back this afternoon as Matthew has a fever and is still jet lagged (he was home only 3 days before heading up to OVRO) and needs some rest.

The boys had doctors check ups this week - Edmund weighs 20 lbs 6 oz and Bronson weighs 37 pounds. They are healthy and looking good. We have recently started flossing Bronson's teeth, just to get in the habit of it, and he loves it. Edmund has recently sprouted 2 teeth on th bottom, which have yet been elusive to the camera.


Oh my! Bronson and I look out the window as I write this to see a wolf walking through the back yard of the cabin. Matthew recently told Bronson the story of the boy who cried wolf, so Bronson is telling me that the sheep are in trouble.

The boys

Spoiler Alert: Edmund sneezes around and Bronson counts.

Where's the fire?

don't worry grandmas, he did not actually have any candy at all.

What am I forgetting...

Well, we've had a visit from Grandma Diane since last we spoke. We also had a visit from our dear friends Fraser and Sarah who drove down from Victoria to play boardgames with us. We've spent the past 6 weeks doing 3 days down in Pasadena, and 4 days up in Owens Valley. It's been crazy busy, but fun. Makes us feel young to pile the kids in the car and drive 5 hours up into the mountains. Live out of a suitcase in a motel because they're painting the cabin. That's right. 4 of us - 1 room, and a fresh loaf of bread, because if we have to do without so much else, we're at least going to have fresh bread.
Anyhow, here are some random pics from the past month or so. Edmund rolls and propels himself forward so that he can get a toy/book/shoe/hand to chew on. Bronson is looking like a real big boy. Mom is tired and dad is working hard.
This picture (above) was taken in August, the picture below was taken a week ago. It's amazing the difference 3 weeks makes in the look of him!

Oh, right! Bronson also turned 3 on Sept 3rd! We were in Owens Valley, to celebrate we went to the train museum, then had cupcakes in the kitchen at the observatory (where w went to cook dinner every night because we were living out of a small simple motel room).
The following weekend, when back in Pasadena we crashed a Chilean party with a cake for Bronson, and the wonderful hosts supplied a Lightning McQueen pinata. B and his friend Jesse were the only kids there, so they now have a lifetime's worth of pinata toys and candy each. I made a train cake for this gathering (because what's a birthday without a cake made by mommy and people singing and candles...just piling on the guilt to ya mom :) )

Hope everyone is well, we are good, I will update sooner rather than later!Here is the first real crop we got from our garden. Below are more and more of what we got. Our garden produced alot of good beans for all of us to enjoy, we also got plenty of arugula and butter lettuce, not enough tomatoes, more chives than I could handle and LOTS of zucchini. Now the season is changing and we have pulled it all up and planted afresh. I hope to do better with my garden photos for Winter 2009.

Yes sirree, we had fried zucchini, zucchini casserole, zucchini loaf, baked zucchini, stuffed zucchini, zucchini brownies, zucchini stirfry, zucchini in the trash can. Next year only 1 plant please!

Fire Photos and Info

So, there's this bloody huge fire a few miles North of us. They're calling it the Station fire because it started 1.5 miles up highway 2 from the L.A. Forest fire station. The number 2 is the highway we usually take to go up to OVRO, but apparently we won't be taking that road anytime soon... the fire has reportedly loosened rockslides onto it, burned railing posts, and melted roadsigns.

This is the official website of the fire. As you can imagine, it is experiencing pretty high traffic. It may take a while to connect. As of 10 minutes ago, the fire is currently estimated to cover 105,000 acres.

The fire is threatening Mount Wilson, home of the Mount Wilson Observatory, as well as a large part of L.A.'s communication towers. The Mount Wilson Observatory is where Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding. Here's a photo of Hubble demonstrating this to some dude with messy hair. The older gentlemen was later reported to have said something about a blunder...


Mount Wilson is posting an update every couple of hours or so on their webpage. They also have a live webcam up there, but it is difficult to connect to due to high traffic. Ground firefighters have been pulled from the summit; after spending a couple of hectic days cutting down vegetation and spreading fire retardant, the situation is now too dangerous for them. Retardant will continue to be dropped by air, but the current plan is to let the fire sweep over the summit and hope for the best.

Besides damaging (and possibly destroying) a priceless historical observatory (not to mention the really cool instruments that are still working up there), the damage to the communications towers will interrupt broadcast television, radio broadcast, and mobile phone reception. If anyone wants to call us in the next couple of days, the home phone may be the best bet.

Some other interesting resources:
Mike Brown (a.k.a. the guy who downgraded Pluto) is tweeting from the 9th floor of Caltech's library.
Daniel at Cosmic Variance has a couple of very dramatic photos.

I took a few pictures over the past few days:


Friday. The smoke cloud is looking even more ominous, now.


Saturday night. 8 second exposure from the top of one of Caltech's parking structures.

Fire

Just a quick post to let you know what's going on with the Station fire, relative to our family.

We can see the fire burning on the mountains, big clouds of smoke during the day and red flames at night. It's very strange going about our daily business knowing there's a natural disaster RIGHT there and 2600 firemen fighting it.
As I left Target yesterday after my weekly grocery shopping I could see the flames, it's just very strange.

There are parts of Altadena (just north of Pasadena) that are under mandatory evacuation, and there was some evacuation in northern Pasadena, but it's not mandatory. The fire is headed East on Mt Wilson towards the Mt Wilson Observatory and the various antennaes there, so we may lose cellphone connectivity.

The worst part of the fire (for us) is the smoke. We're under a cloud of smoke, the air quality in Pasadena is labelled 'hazardous' and we have to keep Edmund and Bronson inside. Matt and I have both been walking to and from work (it's eerie, though, there's no one out on the streets) and we've both got sore throats and ears. I can smell the smoke in my office at work. The mornings are the worst for the smoke, and there are some beautiful and surreal sunrises going on here (yup, I'm up THAT early).

Luckily for us we were not driving up to OVRO when the fire began last wednesday - we were supposed to be going up that day but decided against it the Sunday before because I was worried I was getting sick. When we drive up in the daylight we take the #2 highway right through the Angeles National Forest, right past the Station where the fire started, and for which the fire is named.

When we do go up, we will obviously not be able to take the 2, but we're worried about trying to go around to the West, since the 14 may be unavailable to us as well, so we'll likely need to make a wide detour to the East. At least we'll be headed up to cleaner air and the kids can go outside again.

I read today that they hope to have the fire contained by Sept 8th, which is still quite a ways away!

Pasadenians are advised to think about evacuation and prepare what we'd need to take, so we've done that just in case. Not too much valuable to us, just grab the kids and go mostly.

We will update more frequently as things come up. Matt took some photos off the roof of the parking garage of Caltech the other night, he'll post those soon.

Looking at Old Photos...

August 2007