Hahahaha!
There is a controlled fire to the West South West of us, and the smoke has been coming our way yesterday and today.
The smoke was very thick last night, and it’s medium thick today.
The AQI right now is 71 in Palm Desert, but it’s quite smoky outside our house so I’m trying to stay indoors. 
Old news now, but at its peak Lonnie at channel 2 said NYC hit 400 and change. Lkke 462 or something like that. Had no frame of reference, so the number itself meant nothing to me, as I never paid attention to that.
I had to go food-shopping, and yeah, it stank like there was a house fire a few blocks away. Was nasty that my sinuses were getting irritated and every time I had to snork, blow, spit, whatever, I had that nasty taste in my mouth like I was hanging out in a smoke-filled bar all day.
Would rather not repeat that.
Yeah, for a while, NYC had the worst air on the planet.
The 462 is out of 500, and that’s of course crazy high.
I know I’m complaining about the smoke near our house, but it’s nothing compared to what many people have experienced lately. 
Out of 500 max? Wow, that’s… like… bad.
But yeah, I could definitely taste the difference. 
I used to live in the San Joaquin Valley, in Central California.
The AQI in the summer there would frequently be between 101 and 150.
It would also sometimes be between 151 and 200, and rarely it would be between 201 and 300.
And that’s usually without smoke from a forest fire. 
I think most of the pollutants there are smog from cars, pesticides from farming, and industrial emissions.
Plus the fact that it’s a valley with almost nowhere for the pollutants to go.
I have been told that sometimes Central California would get smog from the Bay Area, and sometimes from the Los Angeles area, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.
At least some of it could be from pollutants coming from Choina (industrial emissions, households burning dirty coal “pucks” for heat, etc.).
Not enough to choke on, but definitely perceptible, and IR satellite pix could actually show the “plume” crossing the Pacific and hitting the west coast.
Holy Crap! It’s worse than I thought! 29% in Frisco isn’t just “perceptible”!
https://www.google.com/search?q=pollution+plume+china+california
Wow, I didn’t realize that!
I guess that Central California getting smog from the Bay Area and L. A. makes a lot more sense if San Francisco gets smog from China. 
So, the air quality here is nice right now.
The smoke is gone (for now), and we’re running the swamp cooler instead of the air conditioner.
It’s much more comfortable in the house because of the swamp cooler. 
More smoke tonight.
Our AQI is surprisingly good, but it’s smoky outside.
I went for a 20 minute walk even with the smoke, and I feel fine, but we had to turn on the A/C again.
I hadn’t gone for a walk for about a week, so I really wanted to get some exercise.
Maybe the smoke is just annoying and not that dangerous?
WTH is a “swamp cooler”? Never heard that term before.
I’m in western NYS. AQI is 32 here. During the height of the Canadian drift it was well over 300 here. Soot on everything…nasty.
A swamp cooler is also called an evaporative cooler.
If you live somewhere with hot summers that has dewpoints below 55 degrees during the summer, you can save a lot of money by using a swamp cooler compared to using air conditioning.
Neat. Thanks for the info.
Interesting to find AC has such ancient origins. The early Egyptians were pretty ingenious. I understand they brewed a pretty decent beer, too. Maybe the ‘swamp cooler’ was their effort to promote the “refeshingly cold brewed experience”.
I’ll have a Pyramid Light, please.
1 Thank
Hell, they had a Goddess Of Beer, ie, Tenenet.
I named one of my NASes that.
Wow, you must have a lot of hard drives!
I don’t have a NAS, but I have 6 hard drives on my main computer, and each of them is 14TB.
Each hard drive is part of a pair, so if one hard drive fails, I don’t lose any unique data.
As big as is economical.
Eg, if the difference between 4 and 8 might be 1.4 (vs 2.0), I’d spring for the 8.
If the difference between 8 and 16 is 3.5 (again, vs 2.0), I’ll go for the 8.
Prices will come down for The Newest to be more flattened.
But it got to the point where having a NAS is nice, but you still gotta hang 'em off a switch/router, and I only even power 'em up when loading crap onto them, or wanting to get something offa them. So after a while I just started getting external usb drives.
Not as suave, but way more economical than NASes.
Anybody else in this smoke trail right now?
Holy ****. This is the worst I’ve seen so far. I thought this was over with.
It’s like the fire is a block away. Everything is just smoke. I tried to take a picture and my phone is like, “please clean your lens for a clearer shot”. No phone, it’s not the lens, it’s the air.
