cumulonimbus—uh, I mean, it's a horse!

Not to jinx it, but we are having a blessedly mild and smoke-free summer—for once, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave except us. Not to worry, though, since we still have a megadrought and increasingly unstable or unseasonable weather. It rained one night last week, enough to leave modestly damp pavement behind. My broken-climate strategy was to live "someplace uphill, with rain," but that looks less tenable as everyone's weather becomes, as was promised, less predictable, and consequently more hostile to human life.

I can't overstate how weird that is, by the way. Growing up in Massachusetts, I would see Bert on Sesame Street, saying "It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky!", but there were always clouds somewhere in view. I'd never seen a cloudless sky before moving to California, and I've always hated it, but at least it used to be consistent.

One of the better books I'm in the middle of, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is a pretty stunning and terrifying look at the history of soil and erosion. It turns out productive soil is a thin skin over bare rock, and a lack of basic stewardship, very much tied to enslavement and the manifest destiny of bashing our way across the continent, has left formerly productive land still poor, hundreds of years later. As with aquifers, we can consume in decades what took millions of years to develop. The math is universally extremely bad. But here we are.

I quite like my adorable little drafting surface...except it really needs a table to put it on, and while we technically have a table, we at the Snugglehaus are going through a period of clutter—also, it's our only table. I bought what is basically a 17" W x 11" H clipboard, and I can make drawings on it that are satisfying enough for practical use. For now.

blargh.

The wildfire smoke finally turned around and hit us for a few days. I bought a couple PurpleAir sensors, which was useful, but awkward: they have built-in webservers, but the outdoor sensor actually has two sensors for some reason. And it was a pain to look at the two side-by-side, when that's actually an important comparison.

One of the many nice things about being a computer programmer is that I know how to find the data made available for computer programs to read and process. And one thing that makes me an expert is knowing that while I could go through the work of creating an authorization key to fetch the data from PurpleAir's service, that's silly, because the sensors are right here on the house network.

   "Adc" : 0,

   "DateTime" : "2021/09/01T06:26:33z",

   "Geo" : "PurpleAir-c882",

   "Mem" : 14200,

   "SensorId" : "10:52:1c:44:c0:87",

   "current_dewpoint_f" : 53,

   "current_humidity" : 35,

   "current_temp_f" : 84,

This is quite civilized: the sensor provides this in plain text, and the fields aren't rocket science to figure out. I don't know what Adc is, but I also don't care, because I want temperature, humidity, and the Air Quality Index, which the sensors label pm2.5_aqi. (PM 2.5 overwhelmingly dominates the AQI calculation for our purposes.)

We have data! But data is not information; information comes when you take your data and apply your questions. You can see that just in the screenshots up there: because I'm not an expert, 759 particles/deciliter is not a number that tells me if I should go outside or turn on another air filter. I need the user-friendly AQI for that. Next technical challenge, is that I would like to know...

• when the AQI goes above one or more threshold values,
• when it goes back down,
• the relationship between inside and outside AQI,
• and temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure, just for fun.

If you've ever done any data processing or visualization—for which you probably used Excel and/or Google Sheets—you have a hint of the challenges, if you want to collect 10 data points, every 2 minutes, store them somewhere, do calculations on them, make them available via a web server, graph them, show the graphs next to each other...it's a pain in the ass. For businesses, it can be thousands or millions of data points, every few seconds. It's so hard that there are many companies you can pay to do it for you. DataDog is one of those. I wrote a 37-line script to send the sensor data out to DataDog, which also lets me set up alerts on it.

If you look at the live version of the charts, you can change the time window, and moving the mouse pointer along any of the charts shows a cursor at the same moment on each other chart, so you can correlate events.

So that's been useful. The wind has turned back for the moment, sending the smoke back to the rest of North America. But it will be back.

we have to run out of burnable material at some point.

As we discovered with the fires of 2018, while we live in the middle of a giant megalopolis and don't need to worry about wildfires touching our house directly, it turns out that a sufficiently large fire, at any distance, can create a barely livable environment. The AQI measurement of air quality, which is normally 40ish on a bad day, has been above 200 all day, and generally miserable for a couple weeks now.

A surprise to everyone was fires exploding in Oregon, which is hardly immune from wildfires overall, but definitely hasn't seen anything like this in recorded history. The fires are reaching towards the Portland suburbs, and one of my minions at work had to evacuate the other day. So that's all terrible, and one wonders if the West, overall, is just not habitable in the relatively near term (5-10 years), which, if true, has dire implications for our secret plan to migrate up to the Pacific Northwest once the kids turn 18 in a couple years.

Another surprise has been that while we have thought, with the pandemic, that we haven't been leaving the house, it turns out that once we are staying inside because of unhealthy air, we learn that we were, in fact, leaving the house a lot more than "never," and that has been important for our mental health. Maslow's hierarchy of needs does not specifically call out "breathable air" at the bottom, it's sort of implied, but it does turn out to be more important than food or water.

Don't get me started on the anniversary of 9/11, when we, as a nation, truly lost our fucking minds.

Maybe I can sleep until, I dunno. December? Is December long enough?

the hits keep coming.

If you had asked me a month ago, I would not have guessed that an area as big as California could be entirely on fire, but here we are.

I'm from New England, where the states are mostly a manageable size, if you leave out the northern half of Maine (which is the largest county east of the Mississippi, and has a whopping population density of 11 people per square mile). California, by contrast, is just shy of 800 miles long, and unless you leave at 8pm, you won't make the drive in less than 12 hours. Here's the Bay Area, with the blue arrow pointing at my house. We're in the middle of civilization, so the fires don't threaten us directly, but the air is awful. Last night the usual pollution metric wasn't bad, but when I ventured to put the trash bins out, the air was full of eye-irritating ash, floating in the beam of my flashlight.

Really, my surprise just betrays my ignorance, or maybe just the tunnel vision of the endless global trauma that is 2020. Prior to the pandemic, Australia was on fire.

All these simultaneous fires come from an anomalous thunderstorm that moved slowly through the area. We don't get thunderstorms here to speak of, since they require heat and moisture, and normally it only rains in the chilly pseudo-winter. This was a legit thunderstorm, though, with louder thunder and very, very bright lightning, for about 4 hours. It did rain a little, but nowhere enough to stop the wildlands from igniting. They would be tinder-dry at this time of year anyway, but we had a stretch of 100º days that ensured everything was extra-scorched.

There is something worse than not being able to go out to coffee shops and dinner with friends and concerts, and that is not being able to leave your house at all because every place you'd go is closed, and the outside air hurts.