A journal of various casual notes and thoughts, collected and edited throughout the day.
Where there’s fire, there’s smoke
Firesmoke.ca has a good graphic on the smoke coverage of North America.
The short-term impacts of wildfires are obvious, but more studies are needed to investigate the long-lasting impacts of wildfires on communities. Not only the physical, but also the mental and economic changes. CBC has a good news story on this.
Ottawa’s Air Quality Health Index is 2/11 today, a lowish risk. We will be getting more smoke as the winds shift and fires spread. Rain would help here to clean the air, but this summer has been unusually hot and dry. We’ve had more days at or above 30C than last summer, which explains my busy air conditioner. According to CTV, in Ottawa, July was the third drier than normal month in a row. In contrast, April was wetter than normal, so it may average out, but it’s these extremes that hit us. And these extremes are really the new normal.
Are heat domes a new thing? Not really. They are characterized by a persistent high-pressure system that traps hot air, leading to intense and prolonged heat waves. We used to call them heat waves, that pass on through rather than staying put. They are more frequent and more extreme now, so the image is a better one of being trapped under a dome. Ditto for the dreaded Polar Vortex. It’s way up in the stratosphere, but it can reach down to the troposphere and affect our local weather. It’s always done that, and we would get what we called a ‘cold snap’ for a few days. Now, with these cold spells becoming more extreme and more frequent, they are linked more clearly to the vortex, a loop of cold that reaches down from the Arctic and stays for days.
SubStack setup.
I started my SubStack three years ago, but I didn’t really get into it until the fall of 2023. In December 2023, I started a podcast section with A Christmas Carol. Over the years, I’ve played with the layout, content, separate sections, and frequency of posts. I started with 50 subscribers, mainly friends and family, on the newsletter mailout list. For all my changes, the number stayed pretty steady, and the feedback stayed quiet as crickets. I have started to pick up a few subscribers in the past few weeks, which is nice, but I don’t know why. It’s still free; I am doing this for my own enjoyment.
Below are listed the current sections. I’ve tweaked some descriptions and changed the settings so the default for them is to go out to all subscribers - I’ll see what, if any, impact that has. Plus, new subs are automatically enrolled in all sections as a default, but can easily opt in/out as they choose.
Odds and ends - Sunday Sparkies of lightish things that have caught my eye, as well as the occasional longer essay.
My Fiction - Notes about my various novels, as well as some short stories/Flash Fiction. On the back burner for now - but soon.
Podcastings - Twice a week, about 30 minutes each. Readings from various copyright-free fictional books, and read as is. I don’t really do voices ;-)
Sort of a Journal - An almost daily record of things that I’ve worked on that day, maybe with some links. Nothing fancy, not that polished, usually not that sparkly.
I’ll see if I get more/fewer subs, or at least comments.