Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

I had planned an "What I've been doing on my summer vacation" sorta post, but scrapped it for more timely news.

Our entire (well most of it) state is on fire.  This is what the sky looks like from our deck last night, around 8.  Last night the smoke was so thick, the street lights came on.  Remember, during the summer we dont have any darkness at all, so they shouldn't be on.

 We can't open the windows, or we can't breathe.  And while we have a tiny air conditioner for the bedroom so TH can sleep when its hot, we can't run it as the area around the window vent lets in to much smoke.  Even with the windows tightly closed we can smell smoke in the house.  It hurts to breathe and everyone has constant headaches.

Rather than try to write what has already been written much better than I can, here are two screen shots and a few links.

The wee balloons are fires.  The dark blue ones are tiny <10 acres="" span=""> 
turquoise are moderately sized, 10 to 250 acres
the yellow are large fires coming in at 250 to 2500 acres
but the red ones are giant >2500 acres 

The vast majority of the fires shown will be allowed to burn, as they aren't impacting humans.

for fire updates, here is our newspaper link.

a map of the fires, if you click the wee colored balloon, a blurb will pop up describing the fire.

air quality

and a facebook page ran by the Alaska DNR  (department of natural resources

This surprised me a few days ago, and here is today's weather from my iphone.  I didn't even know they had smoke as a weather definition on the app.

And one last photo

There is a radio tower that should be visible but isnt as the visibility is down to 1.5 miles.