To Go or Not To Go

Paper towels, olive oil, crunchy demerara sugar, hot Italian sausages, dry roasted and honey-sweet and sesamed almonds, La Posada sherry vinegar for the tomato and onion salads and an aged balsamic for anything that is leafy, a thick, grass-fed London Broil, tomatoes on the vine (diameter no bigger than 1.5") and Italian tomatoes on the vine for pasta sauces, frozen and fresh fruit and non-fat vanilla soymilk for smoothies, organic free-range brown eggs, La Brea Bakery bread hacked in half and frozen for the week ahead, English sausages and bacon, HUGE tasty portabellos, the white wine, good beer and the list went on. This was our obligation...Buzz and Susan were doing the rest of the list which is equally extensive and included the other color of wine.

All of this for a week in a cabin on a lake (with electricity!) and hiking trails and my own pillow and my own duvet and oh, did I mention, about a ton of food? And excellent company! And electricity, sweet electricity.

As the winds begin to whip up here in the Southland and the air is strangely hued and scented from the long-burning Day Fire and with threats of Santa Ana's and an increased fire threat on our own doorstep, we were still excited to be headed northeastwards...that is, until we got this news.

And the owner of the lake-side cabins where we'd be staying called Buzz this morning just to let him know that he'd evacuated the cabins, none of the access roads were currently open and oh...they'd lost all power. No electricity. None.