Smoke but no fire

It seems like every other time we post it's about wildfire ...

This time the fire is about 75 miles away near Santa Maria, so there's no excitement from evacuation watches or burning hillsides here. Instead, we just get a big plume of smoke and ash falling lightly everywhere. At this point we've had smoke and ash so many times that no one in my lab was really put out by it. The conversations went something like:

"Hey, do you know if there's a fire?"
"No, there must be though. The sun had that ominous orange glow yesterday evening."
"Yeah, and there was ash all over this morning."
"Well, I'm sure we'll hear something."

It was especially weird because the weather here had been quite cool and foggy with little wind, not exactly prime fire weather. From what I've heard since, the fire is raging out of control in mountainous wilderness to the North, with no expected time to containment. The weather on the other side of the Los Padres mountains is always much hotter because it's far from the ocean. There's also another, smaller fire about 80 miles away to the North, plus a third inferno in the Santa Cruz mountains near the SF bay area which is the one most likely to be in the news over the next day or two for burning buildings.