The World on Fire

The above is the little visual they used on my weather page to describe tomorrow's forecast. Usually they show pictures of the sun or rainclouds. But yep, that's a pic of wildfire, or "patchy smoke" as it's called in meteorological lingo. This whole week the air has smelled like smoke, and there's a strange morning-after campfire odor that lingers when I walk into the office every day. California is on fire, and the noontime shadows are vague and indistinct and tinged with a yellow-orange halo, and the sunsets are glamorous with their fuchsia orbs of light and color , and the distant hills are lightened by a haze that we would normally associate with fog, but it's not.

At least I don't live in Chile near the Chaiten volcano where the view looks more like this: