You may have heard, but Angel Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay, is on fire.

One interesting side effect of the mental training of meditation is a fine-grained sense of time. As we learn to make our experience of the world be continuous, with fewer and fewer moments where we look up and wonder how we got to that point (do you remember the drive into work this morning? the walk out to lunch or down to the photocopier?), and as we sit for defined amounts of time, we develop a sense of how long a minute is, five minutes, thirty minutes. I'll find I can set a timer for 7 minutes, go back to the computer, and suddenly it will occur to me to go check the food on the stove, and there will be just a few seconds left on the timer. Experience lets us do that over longer and longer periods: my teacher can peg a half hour within a few seconds (I can do it within a few minutes).

This comes to mind fairly often for me anyway, but I was just reading this article about our time sense, which is pretty awesome.