Ash

On Wednesday morning of last week, I woke up with the light having the particular tinge to it that means we have forest fire smoke in the air/atmosphere but there was no smoke smell to it so I didn't think much about it as we've had this off and on for the last month or so.

But when I went out to my car to drive to work, there was ash falling in the air like snow or rain, and a light dusting of ash on my car.  Not a lot, but enough to notice.  There was even some ash inside my car when I got in, which is both impressive and disturbing but I wiped up what I could see and headed to work.

The ash in the air got to me and I was coughing and uncomfortable most of the morning (I did put a mask on eventually and that seemed to help.)

At some point during the morning there was some kind of social media post saying that volcanic dust from the Mt Saint Helens eruption in 1980 was being re-suspended in air by heavy winds in that area and that it was volcanic dust we were getting, and so to be careful in how you dealt with it as it could scratch car paint, etc.

I was SUPER excited by this because WOW who knew!? But it turns out that while there WAS volcanic ash being stirred up, it wasn't close enough to us to be what we were getting.  We had just regular forest fire ash.  

I texted C-Dawg and Jason about it and Jason mentioned how bad it was and I didn't really think it was that bad, but when I went over to his place a few days later and saw what had fallen on their cars etc vs at my place then yeah, they had it bad.  Like big black chunks of soot and debris.  I just had what looked like when someone flicks the tip of their cigarette ash off... light small pale ash.  I had no idea that some areas got it SO much worse, but they did.  

But honestly, getting these reminders of how much worse our summer air could have been had things been different makes me very very grateful for how good we had it this year for sure.