Moving right along to October 2007 and it's FIRE!! Specifically, the "Witch Fire", which pretty much ravaged this area for most of that month. In fact, even my little house was in an area under so-called "mandatory" evacuation orders. Of course, I did NOT evacuate. For one, I'm an adult and I'm perfectly capable of determining whether I'm in danger (or not). In this case, I never was. And second, I stopped taking orders when I got out of the Air Force. And third, I knew that if I DID evacuate, they wouldn't let mere peasants (like me) back into the area until LONG after any danger had passed. Days, weeks. No thanks.
Anyway, here's how the sky looked above my house when one of the fires was fairly close (it never got closer to me than a mile away). That's the sun up there and a corner of my house in the bottom right.