San Francisco Abbreviated
Gusting winds from a tropical storm out in the Atlantic, combined with wildfires that are slowly but surely surrounding Gainesville, have prompted me to cut short my time in San Francisco. For those of you I was planning to meet: I'm very sorry.
I grew up in Kansas, where the tornadoes are plentiful. They're relatively easy to cope with; the ordeal is basically over within an hour or two, and they strike on the scale of neighborhoods (or, small towns). Don't get me wrong; they can be devastating to those in their path. But the path is narrow, and the strike is quick.
Since moving to Florida, I've learned that nature also has an entire arsenal for waging psychological warfare. Before we'd been here much longer than a year, we lived through two hurricanes and a third near-miss (okay, we're quite a ways inland, so they were only strong tropical storms when they reached us), and I learned what it was like to be on alert for days on end. These storms are tornadoes on steroids, cutting swaths of destruction through entire states, not just neighborhoods.
Now, I'm learning about the nervousness that wildfires can inspire. These beasts rage on for days or weeks, blot out the sun - even at noon - and procreate. An unusually warm, dry winter, followed by a cold snap, and seasoned heavily with lightning but only lightly with rain, has produced an entire state that couldn't be more fire-prone if you soaked it in kerosene. It's bad enough that the lightning keeps sparking off new fires; but now, add to that a mostly-rainless tropical depression to fan the flames...and the fires start to multiply like rabbits on Viagra.
Long story short (too late, I know), I'm now on fire-watch, staying close at hand to help if we get the notice to evacuate. The fires are raging on three sides of Gainesville now, and if the winds come up the way they predict, this could get really ugly. I'm no fire veteran, so maybe I'm being a ninny by worrying about this so much; but then, that lack of experience doesn't improve my mood...
So, if I missed you in San Francisco, maybe I'll see you in Atlanta in November (ApacheCon). Sorry things got fouled up.