A day in the life.

I'm totally cheating. This is a day in the life of the sun. And just to be an even bigger cheater, it's not starting at sunrise but sunset and then sunrise followed by midday, because that's the order I took the pictures in. (Click on the pics for larger versions.) I took these during the fires. This first picture was taken in Ocean Beach at sunset on October 21. We had out of town guests, Garrison Keilor and Hercules, and had taken them down to the pier to show off a west coast sunset (also we had hopes to hit up a geocache but it wasn't meant to be). When I took these we had just found out about the fires and the ash was just starting to accumulate in the air. At this point we had no idea how bad it was going to be and were just enjoying the way the smoke affects the sunset. It really does incredible things with the color and the light. What I think is cool about these pictures is that they were all taken at the same time, in the same place and yet the color is completely different because of the different angles the photos were taken at. Also, they look out of order because I didn't get the sun in the second one and for some reason it looks higher in the horizon in the third one than in the first one. I don't know what I was doing with the camera other than panicking that I was running out of batteries. It was mesmerizing though. I'm glad we decided to take the guys to that spot to watch the sunset, I'm not sure what it would have been like elsewhere in the county. That pier was just perfect. The fires were terrible but what a spectacle. This is so San Diego, right here. Half the county is on fire, let's go surfing! I'm joking (sort of), like I said at this point it had only just started and no one thought it would be anything like it was in 2004, lettalone worse. Lettalone is a word isn't it? My spell check is pitching a fit about it. Whatever. Spell check can suck it. After I shot these pictures we went and got the kids some McDonalds and headed back to the house for Munchkin Cthulhu and general not paying attention to the emergency situation at hand. I ended up getting eaten by Dread Cthulhu a couple times and went to bed only to be woken up by Red Todd Kidd a half hour later informing me that the fire thing was kinda important. I ignored him and went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning the smoke was thick enough in the air that you could look directly at the sun, just like in 2004. After dropping off RTK at work I snapped this picture of the sunrise from the gas station right by my apartment (it was $3.01 for regular that day, I wish it would go back to that, I payed 3.11 the other day). Have you ever had the opportunity to look directly at the sun? It's absurdly strange. I find that I have a fundamental urge to shield my eyes even though there's no need. I've never seen a sunrise that looked so much like a sunset as that one, early in the morning the sky was purple instead of brown with ash and smoke, that came later. You wouldn't think the sun could look so small and insignificant as this but there it is. This one was taken at about 3pm on October 22, directly over my apartment. The sky was orange almost all day, about an hour after this you couldn't even see the sun anymore because the smoke was too thick. It was an entire day of otherworldly, dingy twilight like being in some steampunk novel with ash raining out of the sky for several days and starting to collect on anything that was still, like I imagine snow probably does. Postapocalyptic San Diego. So there you have it, a day in the life of a smoke filled sky.