Phoenix (I stole this title from Mike)

In the past month, I’ve been on 9 flights. Of these flights, nearly half have been delayed by more than an hour. A couple have been completely canceled. One of those cancellations put my tired ass in a hotel in Seattle for a whopping 4 hours. Trust me, Seattle was nowhere near my destination. In the upcoming days, I’m scheduled to take 4 more flights. That will bring me up to 13 flights in 40 days. Traveling is fun.

Anyway, 2 of those flights (one with a cancellation and the other with a 1.5 hour delay) were taken yesterday. I had an unanticipated work trip to Pasadena. Now as you may have heard, CALIFORNIA IS ON FIRE! So, I wasn’t too thrilled to be heading right into the hot zone. Still, as a dedicated employee, I packed an extra bottle of water for fire fighting, my laptop for code crunching and headed south. At the airport my water was quickly confiscated of course. Oh well, I tried.

From the air, I snapped a few photos. This one was taken in the direction of the Malibu area:



This is some very smoky air in the Simi Valley vicinity:



Seeing downtown LA obscured by a layer of smog is nothing out of the ordinary, but yesterday, the cloud hovering over downtown was notably worse:



At my office or on-lab as I like to call it which infuriates Mike, the smell of smoke was swirling and ashes rained on me as I walked outside. This is the hood of my car. The white specks are ashes:



Here's a shot of the sun made pink by the smoke (my camera didn't capture the extreme pinkness). I snapped this as I zoomed along the 134. That's a typical thing to do in LA - speed, take photos, talk on the phone and pluck your eyebrows. At the same time. I've lost my touch a bit though. I used to also be able to eat a bowl of cereal on top of all of that.



I joke, but the devastation by the fires is not funny. Here's hoping for calm winds, safe families and unharmed animals. Well, I'm off to the airport any minute now. I'm sure.