…got sung at us before I started work this morning.
We have very patient kitties.
That got handled.
Editing is reaching uncharted territory and into unwritten territory. That means things go more slowly, with pauses for thought. I wish I could go out and sit by the pond, but it’s still too hot. We have the pink sky that says a forest is burning somewhere…I don’t know where.
Summer in Washington. I hate forest fires season. It’s the forest renewing itself: that’s the way it is. But it makes everything look odd-colored and it makes people wheeze. If we could get a little rain right now it would go a long way toward helping firefighters calm it down.
It was 99 here yesterday, breaking a record for a 3-day stint of high heat. It should cool down this weekend, but they’re also forecasting winds, and that won’t help the firefighters.
Forest fires are why I’m real glad not to live next to the woods up here. We have several towering hemlocks and a lot of trees, but if you’ve got this lovely wooded view on the edge of a town—you can lose it to fire and be staring at bare black sticks for a decade until it recovers. Not mentioning the scariness of wondering if the wind is going to shift and move the firefront in a way that the firefighters can’t fix.
The cost of living up here.
I saw something in the last couple days that some researchers think Toxoplasma gondii’s interactions with cancers might lead to a cancer vaccine! 8)
That would be a great thing—plural cancers, eh?
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/8098/20140717/cat-poop-parasite-help-against-cancer.htm
The elephant in the room is: do the 1/3 of Americans that have T gondii “involvement” have less chance of getting cancer? They don’t say, IIRC.
The wildfires in Alberta are sending smoke over Ohio. It looks like a very high thin cloud cover, but it’s the smoke from Alberta……now, if they had just sent some Canadian bacon to go with it………
Our sky is murky pink gray at 3pm. It’s been that way all day. I was able to write this morning, but about 1pm I finally got out the Lysol spray and went through the house. The air is somewhat better and I’m going to try again.
Glaaahhhh. When the cane fields are burned, often we get thick clouds of the smoke that turn the sun orange and drop threads of burnt leaves downwind. Nothin’ like getting an overnight snootful of the smoke, especially when the a/c already is making your throat raw! Naturally since it’s not the rainy season, no relief from that quarter anticipated.
That pinkish gray sky is always a bad sign. I hope your air is still breathable.
One benefit to all the rain we have had this summer is that the forest fire danger is low. As we live on the edge of a forested management area, drought is a huge concern. To have summer people bemoaning the idea of rain after two months of no fog let alone rain (As happened a few years ago when it was so dry even the deep wells dried up.) makes me want to shake them until their teeth rattle. One reason we keep the pool well filled is that it’s twelve thousand gallons of emergency water! And, yes there are generators available to power pumps.
fire locations They’ve at least stopped field burning here in the last 10 years. But it’s just nasty out there. I don’t know whether it’s coming down from Alberta—we’re only 90 miles from the border—or whether we have something of our own burning.—Yep, I just looked—link at the head of this post: 3 in central WA, a few in Idaho and a whole bunch in Oregon south of us. That’s not even mentioning Alberta. Everybody hope for rain. A lot of it. We’ve renewed the forest enough. Time to end the fires and let all the firefighters go home safe.
Actually there are a lot of fires in the Northwest Territories — over 2 million acres have burned and the Yukon and Alberta are sending firefighters to help. I have quite a bit of family in the NWT. Quite a few fires in Oregon. We’ve been keeping an eye out, because although Bob is retired he’s part of an Incident Command Team and they might get called up from Arizona to help. We dodged the bullet down here with very few fires before the monsoons came in even though drought conditions were worst than they were in 2002 when we had the Rodeo-Chediski Fire. The moisture in living trees was around 12% — the furniture in your house has 17-19%. Scary times smd wishing you some temperature relief and rain.
The last time we had a nearby fire, I pointed a fan at a moist terrycloth bath sheet, so the smoke particles would stick to the sheet. It pulled the stink out of the air well.
12%—yow!
Summer in eastern WA does NOT equal summer in western WA. That’s one big reason why I live where I do….besides the fact that I’d constantly be asking ‘where’s the OCEAN?!?!?!?’ if I was on the east side. That said, I have some good friends near Leavenworth who have their dogs in crates in their truck and the essentials packed to go just-in-case since the fire is 5 miles from them. Here’s hoping it goes the OTHER way! Air is fine here near Seattle…..
The fires are in Washington and Oregon and Idaho and Alberta and the Northwest Territories. But our skies here in Montana, east of the Rockies, are grey-white, as though it were a cloudy day, and the horizon is hazy and obscured. And the air smells of woodsmoke.
There are fires active in BC, too, and some in Saskatchewan. Fire everywhere.
I am so tired of coughing. Been coughing since the middle of June, first because of a cold, and now because of smoke. Bah, humbug.