Fires and Finals

Christmas break is right around the corner! We put a mini Christmas tree in our room for decoration. 

We also decorated Maddie's room to surprise her when she got back from Massachusetts. 

Just the other day, campus looked like this....

And then, on Monday night, it looked like this. 

     A huge fire started at the campground right next to campus. Campus got evacuated and we all drove to a church in Ventura. Then Ventura got evacuated, and the group I was in drove to the house of some alumni in Ojai. Late into the night, we weren't sure if we were going to get told to leave Ojai too, so we drove to Goleta, CA (near Santa Barbara) at 3am. We spent a couple days hanging out in Goleta until Emily's mom picked us up and now I'm at her house in Perris. On the way, we passed by some sketchy smoke-filled areas. 

     This fire is still 0% contained so far and has ravaged through 96,000 acres last I heard. They are calling it the Thomas Fire, which we don't really appreciate, since we didn't start it. Actually, campus is totally fine, even though everything surrounding it is burnt up and there's no power. So the authorities are trying to get us all back on campus in time to have finals next week. 

Marya put it well.

     Yeah, they still want to have finals. We've been without our books since Monday and had no classes, but I guess we could still take exams, right?

     We are all eager to get back to campus--and our possessions. It's been a rough few days, but we're counting our blessings. You don't realize how much you love everyone until times like these. I'm just happy I'll be heading home to SD soon, where there is no chance of fires. Until then, we're chilling with Emily's tiny dogs and waiting to hear from TAC.