Like clockwork, 4 years to the week after huge portions of San Diego county burned up in a series of wildfires, it's happening again. Once again, I'm in La Mesa, and once again, my home is not directly threatened. So far, from my vantage point, it's not yet as bad as the last time. 4 years ago, there was an ash fall by day 2 that turned the sky orange, and covered everything. So far no ash at my house, but the sky is starting to turn orange. Massive smoke clouds can be seen to the south, and brown haze can be seen to the north. The North fires are much worse, but much farther away. The South fires aren't threatening much civilization as of yet. They are both far enough away from me that only the worst catastrophic burning could bring them to my doorstep.

Over the weekend, it was my brother's birthday. So, we all gathered in Las Vegas to celebrate. My mother flew in, my brother and his wife were there, my brother's wife's parents were there. And my dad and I drove up from his place in Arizona for the day. I both like and dislike my dad's place in Arizona. It's relatively secluded, in some lovely mountains, with bright stars and not a great many people, which is good. It's in the Mojave desert, in a tourist attraction, is very hot, is very far away from any stores or restaurants (which isn't normally bad, but my dad never has food in his house, so...), and has several inconveniences. Now, his place is still a palace compared to most of the living situations I saw in Peru. My dad has an innate talent for making things far more complicated than they have to be, and his house fits him to a T. There's a particular way to flush the toilet, hot water heaters and gas valves have to be turned on and off with each use, and the substandard, old, and half broken septic tank has to be monitored constantly for leaking. Other than that, its a cute little mountain/desert cabin, that was once a mining shanty.

I took the scenic route to my dad's place on Friday, which also has the added benefit of being very lightly traveled, so no traffic problems were encountered. I stopped at the imperial desert dunes, again, to get better panoramas of the dunes.




I needed more fuel for my photo stitching addiction. When I got to Oatman, AZ, I was just in time to grab a quick buffalo burger dinner from the Oatman hotel restaurant, before they closed at 6:30pm. I tried to get a panoramic of downtown Oatman with the sunset-lit mountains in the background, but my software seems to get really confused with panoramas taken with the camera tilted 90 degrees. So they didn't turn out. Here's a shot of the downtown area, though.

Incidentally, Oatman's main street is historic Route 66.

That night, my Dad and I got into one of our seemingly unavoidable debates. He has become a fundamentalist Christian, and seems determined to convince me that evolution is wrong and that literal biblical creationism is the way to go. Sorry dad, you're not going to get me to agree with you there. His main point of reasoning was that evolutionists were atheists, so he couldn't believe a theory that was used to say that god didn't do something. Well, in my opinion, something can be learned from everyone. If your faith is strong enough, you can take what makes sense to you from evolutionary theory, and simply disregard any direct, implicit statements absolving god of responsibility. To me, it's easier to believe in a god that had such tremendous foresight, that he could start with a puddle of primordial ooze, and set in motion a chain of events across billions of years that would ultimately lead to creatures in his image. My dad countered with the stuff about 7 day creation yadda yadda, and I said, "God is timeless, billions of years are a blink of an eye to him, so 7 days to him must be a long time indeed". Besides, a day is the period of one full rotation of the earth, why would god be bound by such mundane time measurements? He said God was too loving to make a fish suffer out of water long enough to develop legs and lungs, I countered with the fact that whales and dolphins are mammals that adapted to live in the sea, why would the other way around be so difficult. He said whales and dolphins were created to live in the sea, and I said how is it not cruel to place air breathers underwater? Is that kinder than placing gill breathers on land part time? What about other sea going non-fish, like penguins, seal, etc? They don't have much trouble adapting to part-time aquatic life. So what's the hangup?

We'll just have to agree to disagree.
But, my dad does have a lovely view. Here's what he sees out his backyard.


Vegas was uneventful. We went to the Carnival World Buffet, which is famous for being the best in Vegas. It was yummy. My brother had a tooth break, and had to skip his own birthday lunch to go to a dentist. What a shame. He did go to dinner with us, later on. I gambled a little. I lost 20 dollars, then won it back, then called it quits. Then we headed back to Oatman for the night. Sunday morning, my dad made chili, one of the only things he can cook. He accidentally used the "HOT" chili mix, which made it very difficult to eat. I didn't have the heart to not eat it, so I soldiered through it. It wasn't that bad, I just had to go slow. Later, we went to town so he could do one of his gunfights. He's a member of the "Ghost Riders", a group that entertains tourists by staging comedic wild west shows at tourist stops. I'm sure you've seen their like. He really enjoys it, and has some good shticks of his own, such as his "arthritic fall" where he takes forever to fall down after being shot, and his "poof rounds" where he only half loads his black powder pistol so that it goes "poof" instead of "bang". That town is exactly what my dad needs at this stage of his life. After a lunch, I decided to hit the road home. My dad, bless his heart, was visibly disappointed that I was leaving, when he knew I had the next day off, and could stay another night if I wanted to. But, it's a real good thing I left when I did. I barely got back into San Diego before they closed down the interstate due to the fires. I did pass through a great deal of smoke, and actually drove around one area hunting for an open gas station that has since been burned. Weird.

On my way out of Oatman, I got one more Panorama of Boundary Cone Mountain, so named because of it's cone shape, and the fact that it originally marked the border between California and Arizona, now some 30 miles west.

That's Route 66 in the foreground.