We've had some pretty bad luck with fires out here in Reno. One destroyed about two thousand acres on November 18, 2011 and another took out more than three thousand acres on January 19, 2012. Neither one touched my residence, but the next one could have.

I smelled smoke on my way back from Savemart this afternoon, also after buying tonight's ticket to the next Trek. There was a smoldering mound of weeds in someone's front lawn with smoke billowing from it, but nobody was home. Our neighbor hook her garden hose up to the house next door. By the time I was dousing it, there were already flames licking up from the pile. It appeared the mound had been piled densely enough to trap heat inside, a conclusion I reached while bagging them up.

The climate is hot, dry and windy. It's scary to think how far those flames would've gotten if my bread hadn't been moldy, prompting me to set out to buy a new loaf, or if the Into Darkness premier had been scheduled for Friday morning instead of Thursday morning. But on the other hand, said neighbor came out to weed her lawn only a few minutes after I caught wind of the smoke, and it's impossible to tell if the fire would've been beyond control by the time a guy (not sure if he lived there) drove away in the car that was parked in front of the culprit house, which was around the time I was bagging the weeds. Either way, it's scary how something so casual could potentially destroy so much.