Burn baby, burn - Brisbane Inferno

Last night our mountain was on fire. We live on a slope of Mount San Bruno, which lies just south of San Francisco, and the area above us burned like crazy last night. It didn't even come close to threatening our house, but it was pretty smoky and noisy, what with all the sirens and helicopters. An eventful in night in what is normally a pretty quiet redneck town. When Sean took Frieda out for a walk this morning he had to endure several conversations about it from our thoroughly freaked out neighbors. It's contained now, and no homes were destroyed.

Here's some cool pictures

The first one is the view of the smoke from what looks like the other side of the bay and the second is taken from across town. Pretty dramatic.

In other exciting news, Sean and I are gearing up to buy a fancy new iMac. His laptop, as lovely as it is, is dying. The fan runs continuously and about every 6 months or so it eats part of our iTunes library. We can get a discontinued model and with educational discount at Stanford's bookstore, so tomorrow we're taking the plunge. I'm never happy to plunk down a grand on much of anything, and I could probably get a hand-me-down iMac from work, but we have the cash to cover it and Sean's been looking forward to one for years.