Friday, August 28, 2009

Where bad air quality is concerned...

...this has been a memorable day.

Right now Southern CA is dealing with its yearly end-of-summer brush fires, but what I saw today made them more a reality than in any past years. Yes, the air smells like smoke and you don't want to take a lot of deep breaths. Yes, there are traces of ash on the cars that have been parked for a while. But today I saw the billows.

Coming home from the school where I work (after a productive 3 hours doing more setting up) I was heading west on the 10 freeway when I saw what looked like an enormous reddish cloud growing out of the ground at the foot of the mountains. It was almost glowing with the fire. There are several fires burning at the moment. The one I saw was probably the La Canada/Flintridge fire based on the location. With the day's temperature topping out at about 106 degrees, the smoky air, the smell, that billowing cloud, it was awful weather today.

But it wasn't all bad. After leaving work I decided to celebrate my readiness for the first day of school with some sushi and my mom wanted to join me. We went to the Todai buffet and had a great lunch. Today was the day my cleaning lady comes, so it was lovely to arrive home to a sparkling clean house. Shortly after doing so, I fell asleep for 2 hours. That was a GOOD nap. When I woke up, my mom called to say that my nephew was at her house and my brother would be there shortly, so we had a little visit. And at the end of that visit, a lady from church called to invite us to enjoy a 66 cent sundae at Twohey's and we ended up chatting for over 2 hours over ice cream and many glasses of ice water.

So it didn't turn out to be a 3-day weekend like I'd hoped, but I'll enjoy these remaining days a lot more knowing I accomplished a lot this morning in my classroom. The weather is *supposed* to "cool" down to the low 90's by Sunday. Yes, when the 90's feel cool, you know you're in trouble. All in all, a restful weekend seems to be ahead.

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