So then she’ll troubleshoot for an hour before she decides to figure it out another day.

But before she logs off, she’ll see that some of her blogroll links are broken, too.

So she’ll get down to work cleaning out the all those bloggers who return 404 pages. (Sniff!)

And while she’s at it, she’ll correct all the changed URLs for bloggers who’ve moved! (Hooray! New sites!)

But not before an evil, ruthless, bushwhacking urge comes upon her! (Grrrrrrrrr…)

She’ll brutally SLASH AND BURN all those links that don’t link back to her. (”Bwa ha!”)

(Some sites she’ll leave up anyway — for unknown reasons — unless it has something to do with bloggers in the possession of certain compromising photos.)

At that point she’ll start feeling guilty.

She’ll worry she might have deleted somebody who DID link to her, who wasn’t returning a 404 page, and who never, ever blackmailed her.

She’ll resolve to ask their forgiveness but also to tell them to contact Her Mooshishness IMMEDIATELY so she can relink to them again.

And after all this toil, she’ll notice that many other aspects of her site require some major updating in order to work properly — but that’s when she’ll just pick up her moose-sized rear end and go shovel down a muffin.

Make that TWO muffins.

I was ever so happy to see April continuing her Domingo Delicioso. YOU GO, APRIL!!!

I was hoping to find that Miss Snark had decided to come back, but alas. At least this Janet Reid gal seems like a good, emergency backup kind of snark.

And then I discovered this post:

Of late, I’ve seen signs of fatigue from a number of high-profile bloggers who are taking blog vacations, begging for guest bloggers to take their normal place, or in some cases, the bloggers are choosing to keep us updated in other ways – preferring Twitter or other venues.

Three quick examples: Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Bonnie Wren.

“Are Leading Bloggers Getting Blog Fatigue?” at LouisGray.com

Woo hoo! Did you see that? Me! A high profile blogger!

Okay, so this post was made some time ago, but let’s just focus on how the discerning and insightful Louis Gray included me within the same sentence as Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble! I mean, Mr. Scoble and I were separated in that sentence by a mere three letters!

Oooh. Ah.

So. “Blog Fatigue.” I think my absence would be better described as “Poor Time Management.”

Now that I’ve got a paying job, I find it awfully hard to do all the stuff I’m supposed to do, much less all the fluff that constituted my blogging career.

I mean, I don’t know how it happened but Super Sabado got to the point that it took all day to do. So Saturday would be Super Sabado, and then I’d spend all day Sunday to do Monday Morning Mojo, and after that I could barely get through the rest of the week.

People like Bernita Harris, man, they can put OUT. She posts thoughtful, eloquent posts DAILY. And she comments everywhere, too. Trying to keep up with Bernita’s output almost KILLED me.

Even worse, I found everyone else so interesting that I lost hours and hours reading about all their adventures and forgot to have any adventures myself.

So I’ve been wondering: would Ballpoint Wren be the same if I spent less time on it?

And the answer is no, because I can no longer spend the time I used to spend on it.

I mean, I can still do Ballpoint Wren, but it will be different. At least for a while, anyway.

This is a picture of our friends’ beach house mailboxes on Tuesday morning. Ash is no longer falling like snowflakes. What a relief to be able to breathe! Still, when we first drove into the cul-de-sac, ash splashed up from car tires just like water splashing up from a puddle.

Home Depot sold out of air masks Monday night but those little masks really weren’t as helpful as you might think. My sister said after working in horse paddocks and smoke that the inside of her mask was even dirtier than the outside. Little air masks are better than nothing but you need a special kind of filtered mask to protect your lungs in conditions like that.

Those of us lucky enough to be able to come home were eager to clean up. Sweeping your front yard is never so enjoyable as it is when you realize how lucky you are to still have a front yard to sweep.

As we cleaned, we compared evacuation notes with our neighbors. Doug and Carla stayed in Newport Beach where they got a good deal at a motel willing to let them bring in their cats. There was some kind of unexplained rate hike before they left, though. They ate lunch at Fashion Island when a man sat down next to them — it was fellow refugee Emedio from one house down.

Another neighbor called to say he was staying another day in Palm Desert before bringing his family home, as they have serious asthma. Rich and Helena remained at the beach house, but they were there already anyway because of the construction being done on their house. And we haven’t heard from Mike and his wife. They’re probably still at the coast hotel that let them bring their dogs.

Most of us swept up our yards with brooms, wearing masks or wet rags tied on our heads, but some neighbors used vacuums, presumably to keep the ash down. I don’t know if that works, but I saw plenty of people doing it. I think there’s some merit in it, because my experience with the broom blew up a lot of ash clouds no matter how careful I was.

If I see a gardener using a blower, I think I’ll tackle him.

Thanks to everyone for all your prayers because they really made a difference. This fire season is bigger than the 2003 Cedar Fires, but there’ve been fewer fatalities so far, I think because of the aggressive evacuation policy.

Didi’s husband feels it was too aggressive and unnecessary, but I don’t think so. I think it saved lives.

Information is still kind of confusing and contradictory. Everybody complains about it on our local talk radio stations, that there is no clear cut information about what’s going on but really, there is a LOT more information available than there was during the October 21, 1996 Harmony Grove fire. It’s just not always definitive news, but it’s there.

This is a screen capture of our area just before they lifted the voluntary evacuation order. The orange is the burn perimeter, and the yellow is the evacuation perimeter. I put a blue dot over our neighborhood:

And this is the same map this morning, again, our neighborhood with the blue dot. The yellow area is now called the “Witch Fire and Poomacha Estimated Evacuation” as of 11 pm last night. Apparently the two fires merged this morning. Sorry about the increase in map size; for some reason I couldn’t make it the same size it was last night.

As you can see, it looks a bit more threatening than it did at 4 pm yesterday but the skies are clearer than they were, so I think perhaps the map is off a bit. It’s now almost 9:30 am 10/24 and they haven’t updated the map, either.

Here’s a link to the map itself. Posting it here just slows the page down.

Here are some more resources for anyone who is out of town and worried about friends and family in this area:

• An incredible set of satellite maps and information from San Diego State University.
• Again, the KPBS Google Map showing the fire and evacuation perimeter.
• The City of Carlsbad Fire Information web page.
• The San Diego County Emergency Page. I obsessively reloaded this page yesterday and the day before. Most of the time it wouldn’t load, but it now seems to be working okay.
• The Union-Tribune home page with fire coverage.
• North County Times home page with fire coverage.
• The KPBS Twitter page… kind of nice how frequently they update this.
• KPBS Live Radio Stream.
• KFMB News Coverage.

Last night passed without incident for us, probably the luckiest of any Southern California evacuees. I’m telling you, if you have to be displaced from your home, there’s nothing like being displaced into a lovely beach house in Encinitas.

Whether or not our cul-de-sac needed to evacuate is up for grabs, though. We got an automated phone call telling us everyone in Olivenhain had to leave, but we don’t live in Olivenhain. We live in southeast Carlsbad, just over the Olivenhain border. So did the call mean we had to leave, too, or only that the Reverse-911 machine thought it was calling Olivenhain?

And then a cop drove through our cul-de-sac with a bullhorn and announced it would be better for us to go. That’s when I called up Hubby and asked him to meet us at our friends’ beach house.

We didn’t evacuate during the Harmony Grove fire even when it rolled right down to the street behind our house. We assumed if we were in any real danger that we’d be alerted by the authorities, so we stayed put. Later we learned NOBODY had been warned due to lack of resources and we vowed we would never be so complacent again.

But once we were at the beach house I wondered if I’d jumped the gun. The news and internet only provided conflicting opinions. Yes, it is a mandatory evacuation area. No, it’s only an advisory evacuation area. Wait a minute, it IS a mandatory evacuation area. Nope, it’s only an advisory evacuation area. Who do you believe?

I felt very guilty watching all the people on TV who definitely HAD to evacuate because the fire was beating down their front doors. There they are, crammed into the Encinitas Senior Center or Qualcomm Stadium while Mojo and I enjoy the view of Moonlight Beach.

And then there were people like my sister and brother-in-law who actually did some good during the fire besides hide out at the beach. They helped evacuate horses. All I did was sit in a cushy arm chair and search Craigslist for horse trailers for her. God bless cell phones and the internet, that’s all I can say.

This morning we checked on the house and it was fine. The fire didn’t even cross into Olivenhain. I’d guestimate about a third of our neighbors were back in their homes already, if they ever left.

I grabbed Great Grandmother’s milkmaid creamer just in case, wrapped it up in a beach towel and stuffed it into the van. I also got Hubby some clothes and his razor. Now we’re all at Hubby’s work, where the air is filtered and it’s easier to breathe. There’s a new fire just northeast of us

I want to thank all of our brave fire fighters and support staff and people like my sister and brother-in-law. You guys are my heroes.