I know I am a bit of a broken record but today the Bay Area had the worst rated air quality in the world. A dubious honor. Stores are out of masks and air filters. People are driving out of the area to escape the smoke. Luckily for some people, they were already leaving for the holiday but we don’t have plans to go anywhere so we are staying home huddled by our air filters, hoping that the rain will come sooner rather than later and that we will be able to leave the house with a mask!
smoke
new filters and fuzzy friends
In case anyone is curious, this is my new air filter. It kind of looks like a giant version of the old iPod nano.
I bought it on Amazon, of course. For comparison, this is my old air filter, which doesn’t have fancy cycling modes or an air quality indicator (that blue light on the right goes red when the air is bad) and it is super loud but if the light on the new one is to be believed, it has been doing a pretty good job!
I need to figure out what model it is, actually, and buy a new filter. It has been running constantly for several days and I last replaced the filter last year during a bad fire week. I’m not sure how much of the smoke they can handle and I’d rather be safe than sorry!
In less boring, more cute news, my dog had a playdate today. They spent some time wrestling under the couch as usual, but then they had a rest, adorably.
I have been knitting on the sleeve since I last posted about the sweater problem but it’s too late to get a new picture. I’ll aim for that tomorrow!
where there’s smoke, there’s climate change
Most of my day today was spent thinking about smoke and fire. There is a large, mostly uncontained fire burning in Paradise, CA to the northeast of where I live. Because we live in a valley, if the wind is heading in our direction it funnels much of the smoke straight down towards us. As a result, I spent a lot of today looking like this.
The mask makes my throat and lungs burn less but it doesn’t do a thing for my slightly crazy curls.
I tried to get a picture that showed the smoke clearly but it is a challenge with an iPhone.
I think the sun made it most obvious that something was wrong with the sky. It gave the light an eerie apocalyptic glow.
What I am saying is: all of this is terrible. It is very late in the year for a fire this bad. We had almost no rain in October this year, which is not usual. Climate change is a real problem and it is long past time for us to do something about it before we all end up looking like I do in the photo above every time we go outside.
the sheep free knitter 