Hi, everybody, welcome to the Cognitive Dissidence Podcast, or is it a show? I don't know.

We'll call it a podcast, Cognitive Dissidence Podcast. I'm it a show? I don't know. We'll call it a podcast,

Cognitive Dissidence Podcast. I'm your host, Parallel Mike from the Parallel Systems Broadcast and Parallel Mike podcast. And I'm joined by my co-host and Monica, I'm going to hand it over to you because it looks like you are back in your beautiful house. So do you want to just update us as to how it's going over there? Absolutely. Yes,

I'm Monica Perez from the Monica Perez show. And last time we talked was two days after my entire town. We were right in the middle of the blast zone for one of the two big LA fires. And I mean,

when I was talking to you, I really still smelled like smoke.

I was absolutely shaking.

I didn't want to cancel our show.

And so the difference between that, which was about one month ago, I think four weeks

almost to the day, it's four weeks to the day since the fire.

And just it's been such a long road, even for me and my house didn't burn down.

I mean, it was damaged, but we managed.

Many things came together for us to save it.

And it was a lot, even this past month, there's a lot of scare about toxins and you can't go up there and our gas was out, our power was out.

Our electricity is out,

our Wi-Fi is still out, so we had to buy a little, like a weird little station for the house,

hat to the elusive Mr. Perez for that.

And so it was amazing.

They had sheriffs, police, the National Guard, stopping us from coming home.

In the beginning, we were climbing over fences and stuff and gates because there were animals up there.

My neighbor had chickens. We had a lot of steak in the freezer. We had to access the house just to, you know, button it up.

And we were okay with the sheriff and the cops. Like, we would be like, hey, can we go in? And they'd say no. And then we'd be walking out with backpacks full of stuff. And they're like, where did I? So I guess you got it and we're like, ha ha. When the National Guard showed up, I was a little freaked because they're, I mean, I really don't know any of them, but my idea was like, they might be weekend warriors who are just like, hey, never get to use this thing. I thought, I'm probably not going to be the guy who's sneaking around. And so we, so, but after, they were nice though. When you went through, there were checkpoints, but they weren't super crazy. Like, I didn't have my current driver's license, but I had like a piece of mail. They weren't super crazy. And I was like, yeah, they make you think they're super scared you about looters. So they made you feel like they were there for you. And they were.

I mean, there were two motorcycle cops in front of our house.

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