Overview

Hi everyone. Although we and the cats are safe, we lost our house and almost all of our belongings on January 8 2025 in the Eaton wildfire, along with thousands of other homes and buildings. Our neighborhood is completely wiped out by the fire. As we deal with the shock and logistics we want friends and family to stay updated but are finding it hard to do individually via text, messages, and email. So, we are repurposing our wedding website to provide information for people we care about. Apparently you can't rearrange pages on mobile, so the wedding stuff will linger here until we have a computer again.  Done!

On Tuesday (Jan 7) night, we were at our house having dinner with Laura's family when they got a call that there was a fire in the canyon by their home and they needed to evacuate. They live ten minutes east of us so they rushed to get their pets, and we started getting ready to leave as well as a precaution. When Laura's parents returned to our house, we were able to gather our pets, a few mementos, an overnight bag, and some important papers/items and left before 8pm. When we departed, the fire was moving east, not west towards us, and we thought we were just being cautious. Unfortunately, the fire later turned towards the house. At 5:30am the next day, the living room smoke detector sent a brief alarm to our phones, and it turned out to be the last time we saw our house standing. 

We stayed at a friend's house Tuesday night, and then at a hotel in Anaheim for a few days due to the poor air quality closer to the fire. Later on Wednesday, we were able to briefly visit the the place we called home even as fires continued nearby, and confirmed it is a total loss(see video below). Luckily, Laura's parents' house is still standing so far. 

Now we're trying to figure out what to do. What will happen longer term with homeowners insurance and rebuilding or moving is unclear to us right now. We have some limited clothes, toiletries, and toys for Autumn, so we're set for a few days. We've gotten the essentials and some replacement items, so we're able to function day-to-day. 

Many of you have asked if there's anything you can do to help. Your love and support means everything to us; knowing we have a great network helps a lot. We aren't really set up to receive packages or drop-offs, or have anywhere to store much at this time. If you feel the need to help materially, sending money so we can deal with immediate needs is the most useful in the near term:

We have also changed our mailing address to a friend's, but have been told that it may take 7-14 days for the change of address to get processed by USPS, so anything sent to our old Altadena address between the beginning of the year and going forward may be stuck in transit for a while, or possibly lost altogether. If you want to send us anything, please don't use the old address, let us know directly and we can provide the temporary address.

Thanks for checking in!

Drive by of the house post-fire on Wednesday January 8

You can see our latest status below, and previous status updates on subpages listed here:

January 9 (Thursday) 

January 10 (Friday) 

January 11 (Saturday) 

January 12 (Sunday) 

January 13 (Monday) 

January 14 (Tuesday) 

January 15 (Wednesday) 

January  16 (Thursday) 

January 17: Official LA county photos of the house remains

January 18 

January 19: Visit to the house

January 20 

January 21

January 22  

January 23 

January 27

Over the weekend, we took Autumn out of LA for some hiking and a change of scenery. Getting back on Sunday afternoon, we resumed work on the house, meeting with several people to better understand the contours of rebuilding. LA got rain Sunday and today, leading to snow on the mountains due to the colder temperatures, but no reports of significant erosion in Altadena thus far. We plan to revisit the property later this week to assess any changes. 

Autumn is really enjoying the temporary daycare, where she made some banana nut bread that she brought back and shared with us. We're still hopeful that she can rejoin her regular daycare class soon. The daycare has completed remediation work and we are waiting on the results of post-remediation testing to make sure it's safe for Autumn to return. 

We have one more week of working on the fire issues full time, then we'll have to return to our regular jobs and work on these issues in our evenings and weekends. Phase 1 of the remediation work, being done by the EPA, has officially started today. This phase will remove all identifiable hazardous waste from the burn areas (batteries, gas canisters, chemicals, etc.) before Phase 2, when the lots will be bulldozed and soil removed. From what we've heard, Phase 1 may take 2 months or so to complete.