Smoky Days & Nights

In recent days, the skies have looked and smelled a bit strange. The skies have an almost orange or yellowish tint to them, and you can smell a smoky kind of scent. My own sense of smell is a fraction of what it used to be, and yet I could distinctly smell the smoke. There are times when you cannot smell it, but there are other times when it comes through intensely. And the past few days have been significantly darker, and I believe cooler, than they normally would have been.

All of this is because of some major wildfires up in Québec province, in Canada. There have been enormous wildfires there, due in large part to dry weather and strong winds. These are headlines and scenes that you kind of expect out in western North America, but not usually in the northeast like this. And despite Québec being hundreds of kilometers away, the smoke has traveled all the way down here, significantly hurting the air quality in certain American states, particularly New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. I even heard that the smoky air reached all the way down to Florida, although my guess is that they got maybe a tiny fraction compared to the states further north, closer to the Canadian border. 

Once again, it feels like this kind of unusual natural disaster is becoming more commonplace. This is usually the kind of news story that you hear about out in California or other Western states, which tend to be mostly dry. Not the eastern portion of North America, which tends to get significantly more rain. But these feel like different times. 

Many people took and posted pictures at the peak of the "orange" tint, if you will. Unfortunately, my camera was not working very well. It is an old phone, and has been acting up, but it was acting up more than usual, even, in recent days. I tried to take a picture of the moon in the early hours (remember, I work overnights), because it had this extraordinary color. Unfortunately, the picture that I took hardly looks more than a tiny streetlight in the dark. And the pictures that I took during my evening stroll were of a fancy Camaro, which I took for my son (who is a bit obsessed with cars, at least at the moment). In the background, you can definitely see the smoky quality of the air (not a filter, and not fog or anything more normal like that). Might as well publish these, as admittedly disappointed as I was with how they came out.