There are good days, and there are bad days. Yesterday was assy.

There’s a fire going on just outside my window. The hills have been on fire since noon yesterday. It’s a pretty big fire, and now they’ve been working on it for almost twenty-four hours. It’s not that the fire’s close enough to threaten our home, and in fact it’s not threatening any homes, but it’s a pretty big fire and you can see the smoke from it all over Hollywood.

The helicopters started just after noon yesterday. Loud, zooming, rattling the furniture helicopters were circling my house. We live near a highway, so it’s not uncommon to hear helicopters circling an accident, following a high-speed chase, or headed towards downtown. But they don’t usually hover so close, or stick around for so long. After an hour, when the helicopters were still making so much noise you couldn’t do anything but wait for them to pass, we checked the news and saw the fire.

I’ve mentioned before that I live near a reservoir. Helicopters equipped with water tanks were flying back and forth from the reservoir to the fire, dipping into the reservoir to refill their water supply before going back to fight the fire. This happened every ten minutes for the next eight hours.

It’s difficult to get irritated when you can see that Los Angeles is burning. I had a meeting, anyway. It took two hours to get there and back, and the meeting was only twenty minutes long. Plus the traffic was insane because everybody was craning to watch the gigantic “T” of smoke billowing across LA that looked like we somehow had a volcano erupt.

It all made for a very grumpy yesterday, and a not very interesting entry here. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t nap, I couldn’t do anything but listen to the helicopters graze my roof on their way to fight the fire that I couldn’t do anything about. I couldn’t even really see it unless I stood on my bed and looked out the window.

Oh, and there they go again. The helicopters have started again. It’s another day of life in a flight path. There’s nothing to do but put headphones over your ears and try to ignore the rattling coffee cup next to your hand.

One year ago yesterday we had a pretty noticeable earthquake here in LA. I was mostly naked, drying my hair for a show when I felt the ground moving under my feet. Since the hairdryer was blocking out most of the noise, I just assumed Ray was in the basement moving some things around (it’s not unlike Ray to suddenly need to move things around in a basement). It wasn’t until I looked up and saw the window rattling that I knew what was happening. I dropped the hairdryer and moved to a doorway just as the earth stopped moving. It was all everyone talked about, the earthquake, until two days later.

And now there’s another natural disaster happening right outside my window (There goes another helicopter). It’s going to be another day of waiting to hear what’s happening next. It’s already a week full of tension and jumpiness, and the sound of helicopters roaring overhead isn’t helping at all.