Its been about a week now of checking PurpleAir before I check Twitter, which if youd told me in 2011 when I started this blog would be the morning routine of the future I probably would've laughed at you. But here we are. The SCU and LNU Lightning Complex fires kicked off after that absurd dry lightning storm rolled through on the 16th and 17th, something like 12,000 strikes in three days with almost no rain to go with it, and the Bay Area has been sitting under a haze ever since. Not the full apocalyptic orange-sky thing (Ive seen photos from friends near some of the burn areas that look like a different planet, but here in my particular pocket its just a persistent grey-brown filter over everything, like someone left an Instagram preset on by accident).
The AQI on my phone this morning said 168. Unhealthy. Yesterday it touched 190 for a couple hours in the afternoon and I genuinely considered driving somewhere just to sit in a parking garage with clean air for twenty minutes. Didnt do it. Instead I did what everyone I know is doing, which is taping a box fan to a MERV-13 filter with painters tape and calling it a day. There are actual plans for these online now, diagrams and everything, which is a very 2020 thing to need.
The part nobody warns you about is the mask math. I've got the cloth ones for grocery runs, obviously, and then a box of the actual N95s I bought back in February before they vanished from every shelf in the country, which I've been rationing like they're going out of style (they already did, twice). Turns out cloth masks do basically nothing against wildfire particulate, which is fine and cotton and comfortable for COVID, useless for smoke. So now theres a second mask decision every time I walk out the door, which of the two apocalypses am I dressing for today. Sometimes both.
Working from home during all this has been its own weird experience. I already had the setup dialed in back in March, desk by the window, decent light for video calls, plant that I've somehow kept alive. Except now the window is the problem. Keep it open for air and the smell gets in, close it and the room gets stuffy because obviously I'm not running the AC 24/7 on a freelancer's electric bill. And the light through the haze does this flat orange-grey thing that makes every Zoom call look like it's being filmed through a coffee filter. Had a call yesterday where someone asked if I was okay, like health-wise, because of how I looked on camera. I was fine. It was the sky.
I'll admit I've been avoiding writing about the Epic Games and Apple fight even though it's the actual big tech story of the month, mostly because every outlet with a pulse has already run the "Fortnite pulled from the App Store, epic sues, here's a timeline" piece about four times over by now, and I don't have anything to add to that pile-on. What I will say, as someone who's shipped a couple small apps through that same 30% pipe over the years, is that the thing everyone's missing in the outrage cycle is how boring and slow Apple's review process itself is day to day, long before you ever get to the fee fight. Thats the actual daily friction indie devs deal with, not the headline lawsuit stuff.
Anyway. Somewhere around hour six of today I gave up trying to get real work done and just sat with the windows shut, air purifier humming on high, rereading old posts on this blog from other Augusts. 2013 me was worried about SSD prices. 2016 me was annoyed about a printer driver. Feels almost quaint. Not that I'd trade problems, exactly, just noting that the range of things a person can be mildly irritated about is apparently bottomless, and this year decided to stack a few more on at once.
Forecast says the smoke might clear a bit by the weekend if the wind shifts. I'm not holding my breath, pun very much intended.