Smoke

Peer down towards the end of the street there past that red truck and you’ll see just how hazy it has been here today. That isn’t fog or normal haze, that’s smoke. Thick, reeking smoke from wild fires raging up near the Canadian border with Minnesota. So not only are we putting up with temperatures in the mid 90s (it hit 99F in Milwaukee yesterday and 98 here at the house south of Green bay) but the heat dome is pushing the smoke down right on top of us. We’re under a severe air quality alert until tomorrow afternoon and that might be extended farther unless conditions change. They’re saying children and elderly shouldn’t even go outside unless necessary.

We’ve had the house buttoned up tight with the AC going for days now already because of the heat, plus we have the three big HEPA filters going full time so i the house here we can’t even smell it. But as soon as I step outside it… Wow… Just the smell is enough to make my eyes start to water.

This is getting to be a regular thing every summer now. Because of the changes in wind patterns and the increase in wildfires because of droughts, both caused by climate change, we’ve been enduring this every summer for the last three or four years now.

We’d been running the house completely on solar for about 5 days now but I’ve had to switch back to grid power by 5 this afternoon because we just aren’t getting enough power from the panels to keep things going. I could just run the house off batteries but we’re supposed to get thunderstorms tomorrow so I want to keep the batteries topped up in case the storms take down the grid.