A wildfire burned at least 2 acres of brush Tuesday in the Ramona area, amid Santa Ana winds, according to Cal Fire San Diego.

The fire is near Highland Valley Road and Rangeland Road, Cal Fire said on social media at 3:50 a.m. Tuesday. By 5:30 a.m. the fire was 50% contained and by 7:30 a.m. the fire was 100% contained and Cal Fire estimated the final acreage at 1.8.

#Highland5Fire [Final]The fire’s final acreage is 1.8 acres and is 100% contained. pic.twitter.com/OU35PcFizl

— CAL FIRE/San Diego County Fire (@CALFIRESANDIEGO) December 10, 2024

Cal Fire said the fire had the potential for an extended attack fire.

The county is experiencing the most severe Santa Ana winds of the season. The winds are also combined with drastically low humidity prompting a Red Flag Warning with SDG&E shutting off power to thousands and school closures.

A red flag warning for dangerous fire conditions will be in effect from 10 a.m. Monday until at least 4 a.m. Wednesday.

Please refresh this page for updates on this story. Details may change as more information becomes available.

Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who rose from borrowing money to release her first book to decades as a literary celebrity sharing her blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81.

Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars,” died Monday with her life-long partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson

“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, said in a statement on behalf of the family.

Author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, her readings and other live appearances and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech among other schools. Poetry collections such as “Black Judgement” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from “The Tonight Show” and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday.

In poetry, prose and the spoken word, she told her story. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis and reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family and rocketing into space, a journey she believed Black women uniquely qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, “Night Comes Softly,” and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others.

For a time, she was called “The Princess of Black Poetry.”

“All I know is the she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, most honest woman I know,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to “The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni,” an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003. “To love her is to love contradiction and conflict. To know her is to never understand but to be sure that all is life.”

Giovanni’s admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her “Living Legends” summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, “Gemini.” She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”

In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama:

“I’ll walk the streets

And knock on doors

Share with the folks:

Not my dreams but yours

I’ll talk with the people

I’ll listen and learn

I’ll make the butter

Then clean the churn”

____

Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, “I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married.” Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.

She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon called “Nikki” by her older sister. She was 4 when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights, outside of Cincinnati. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” in Knoxville.

As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school. College was a time for achievement, and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her “attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.

Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, “Black Poetry Black Talk,” which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published “Black Judgement.” The radical Black Arts Movement was at its height and early Giovanni poems such as “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “Of Liberation” and “A Litany for Peppe” were militant calls to overthrow white power. (“The worst junkie or black businessman is more humane/than the best honkie”).

“I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?” she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. “A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book.”

Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to “vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote.”

Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem “Nikki-Rosa.” It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in “one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in,” which transcended it.

“and I really hope no white person ever has cause

to write about me

because they never understand

Black love is Black wealth and they’ll

probably talk about my hard childhood

and never understand that

all the while I was quite happy”

Major League Baseball’s annual Winter Meetings are underway in Dallas. Now that Juan Soto’s gargantuan contract has been solidified the market for free agent outfielders should get active in a hurry. Soto is a special case so his 15-year, $765 million “I am Steve Cohen, hear me roar” contract really has no impact on how other players are going to be paid.

Michael Conforto, on the other hand, could create a ripple effect. The Dodgers gave the 32-year-old outfielder a one-year, $17 million deal that seems like a reach for a guy who’s never driven in 100 runs in a season. If that’s the going rate for a good but not life-altering talent then … and we take no joy in admitting this … it might get extremely difficult for the Padres to hang on to Jurickson Profar.

It’s no secret that Profar is at his best in San Diego and the Padres are at their best with Profar. But, if Conforto got $17 million then Jurickson has a legitimate argument he’s worth at least that, which could very well make him too expensive for the the Friars, especially with big-spending teams like the Yankees and Red Sox in the market for a corner outfielder.

Padres general manager A.J. Preller, who is rarely caught without a backup plan, has assembled some interesting under-the-radar players that seem like low-risk, potentially high-reward plays (not unlike Profar was a year ago when he signed for one year and $1 million). The first guy on that list has been with the club for several years already but never played at Petco Park.

Tirso Ornelas was signed as a 16-year-old as part of the Padres 2016-17 international class. The Tijuana, Mexico native has been in the organization ever since, putting up good but not great numbers. In 2024, things may have finally clicked.

Ornelas had his best professional season at Triple-A El Paso, hitting .297 with 23 home runs and 89 RBI. He’s carried that success over into the Mexican Winter League, rolling up a .922 OPS with Charros de Jalisco. In the middle of last year the Padres added Ornelas to their 40-man roster, meaning he’ll be at big league Spring Training with a chance to earn a roster spot.

Then we have a couple of players who were added on minor league contracts. Yonathan Perlaza is a 25-year-old, switch-hitting outfielder who looked like he was an up-and-coming prospect in the Cubs organization. As a member of the Iowa Cubs in 2023 he finished 5th in the International League in OPS (among qualified players), then headed overseas to play the 2024 season with the Hanwha Eagles in the Korea Baseball Organization, where he led the club with 24 homers.

Perlaza will also be at Spring Training to see if he can earn a reserve outfield spot. But, the guy who might have right of first refusal on left field if there’s an opening is Oscar Gonzalez, who goes by the nickname “SpongeBob.”

Gonzalez got the moniker in the minor leagues when he started using the theme song from the SpongeBob Squarepants TV show as his walkup music because, as he said in an interview, “Because kids love that song and this is a kids game.” If that doesn’t make you immediately like the guy, perhaps his penchant for winning playoff games will.

When he came up as a rookie in 2022, Gonzalez hit one of the most memorable home runs in postseason history. Cleveland and Tampa Bay were tied in the 15th inning when he launched a walkoff solo shot to send the Guardians to the American League Division Series.

He followed that up with a walkoff single in Game 3 of the ALDS against the Yankees, a series New York eventually won in Game 5. After that season, things went downhill. Gonzalez battled injuries in 2023 and was placed on waivers. He spent last season in the Yankees organization but never got back to the Major Leagues. When he hit free agency, the Padres swooped in to grab him on a minor league deal.

Gonzalez is still just 26 years old. The Friars are hoping he can revert to his rookie and, at worst, be a reliable depth piece on a club with World Series aspirations.