Our old (old as in previous, not old as in aged) marketing director once told me that I needed to change the title of my blog posts, to draw people in. This was when I was writing the occasional post for my business. She was probably right.
Anyway... Oregon is on fire!
It's true. I think I read there are 800 wildfires in Oregon right now, covering hundreds of thousands of acres. I'm tempted to do a quick google search to see if these numbers are accurate, but I'm slightly more tempted to just keep writing. If I'm wrong, someone will let me know in the comments. Or more likely, nobody will let me know in the comments, because I don't really have any readers, and I'm also not sure if commenting is enabled.
In any case, it's nasty and smoky outside. Here in Eugene, we haven't seen the sky since sometime last week. I'm pretty sure it's been beautiful blue skies and bright sunny days on the other side of the reddish-brownish-grey haze, but it's hard to tell, because all I can see is the reddish-brownish-grey haze. Today's actually the best it's been in a while. The air quality folks say it's just "unhealthy." The past few days have been "very unhealthy" and sometimes "hazardous." The regular folks say it's "nasty," and the past few days have been "really nasty." You know, the kind of nasty that makes your eyes sting and your lungs hurt. On Sunday, my wife and her mother took our new motorhome to the coast to escape the nasty. They were going to stay one night.
(pause for effect)
It's been three days and I hear they might come back today.
My son and I stayed here and toughed it out. I woke up the next morning smelled the nasty smoke in my bedroom. So we grabbed our air purifier, our dog and two cats, and we went down to wait it out in the TV room, which is a tiny, windowless room in the corner of our daylight basement. The air in there was great! My mom came over to escape the smoke in her house, and she joined us all in the tiny, windowless room. The dog took a nap. One cat sat at the door and repeatedly cried to be let out. The other cat just pushed against the door and hoped. It started to get hot in there. It started to get boring in there. My mom lasted about half an hour, then left to see what it was like at the supermarket. I'm not really sure why she wanted to see what it was like at the supermarket, maybe she was going to spend the day there, shopping for food and using their bathroom. A few minutes later she texted that she was heading to the coast to join my wife and mother-in-law. My son and I stayed here and toughed it out.
We let the animals out of our safe room and figured they'd fend for themselves. They did. A few hours later we decided to go out to lunch, to get a break from the excitement. Just walking 5 feet to the car was disgusting. We drove to Toshi's for some ramen. A couple of idiots were sitting and eating outside. I know they were idiots because they both were wearing t-shirts that said, "I'm with stupid!" Not really... I called them idiots because they were eating outside in the nasty. But maybe they were just cigarette smokers. I read that on the worst day, if you stayed outside and breathed our nasty air for a full 24 hours, you'd inhale about the same amount of dangerous particulate as if you smoked a half a cigarette.
I also read that burning 10 pounds of wood puts out 4,300 times as much bad stuff as 30 cigarettes. I wonder who came up with that statistic, and what specifically was the problem with his or her calculator. Cuz if it were my statistic, I would have said that burning 10 pounds of wood for an hour puts out as much bad stuff as 129,000 cigarettes. You know, because 4,300 x 30 = 129,000. In any case, I believe that burning wood puts some bad stuff into the air. I believe that smoking cigarettes puts some bad stuff into your lungs. And I believe that Oregon is on fire, and I'm ready to see the sky again.