I’ve got on my walking shoes. And long pants. And look what this rain has done for my lawn!

When I’ve mentioned it, other people have told me this happens each year. Not that I’ve noticed. This is the first summer it’s made an impression on me, anyway.

By “it” I mean this: We don’t have cold water anymore. You turn the handle with the “C” on it, and you get a liquid that is only slightly, if at all, cooler than the blood in your veins. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for some time, but I know a lot of y’all are numbers people, and I couldn’t quantify it. I couldn’t find my old thermometer that I used to use for developing film at home. The ideal temperature for developing Tri-X — which is what I usually used — was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know how warm this water is, but I assume I’d have to greatly reduce development time to use it without cooling it somehow, with a likely loss of image quality.

And it’s cloudy! I love cloudy…

(I found one on Amazon, and it was pretty cheap, but I didn’t want to spend even that for one blog post.)

Anyway, have y’all noticed it? And is it news to you, or did you notice it years ago? (And no, I’m not talking about the usual slight warming we get every year, but something so far beyond that that I think maybe the “hot” is also on — but it isn’t.)

I might be more conscious of it because unlike most members of the fam, I’ve been here all summer (except for a few days in Memphis, which ain’t exactly the arctic.) My wife spent a week in Alaska with a bunch of friends from the all-girl high school from which she graduated. One daughter and two of her children have spent a good bit of time in Canada, when they weren’t in New York. Her other daughter lives in Asheville, which is like being in a different hemisphere from here. Another of my daughters just came back from a week in Boston and an island off the coast of Rhode Island. My third daughter has stayed closer, but did spend a few days in New York. My boys have stuck close to home, although one took his family to Costa Rica. That, of course, was a great trip, but not the same as these journeys north that turn me a bit green, while of course I’m happy for my loved ones.

Right now, though, I’m able to look back on that envy with shame, because now I’m as blessed as anybody.

Can you believe this weather? It’s felt like fall, or maybe Amsterdam, where we spent a week last summer. It’s truly wonderful. Sure, those Parisians I wrote about recently might complain that it’s getting up to 80 today, but you and I know that 80 is a treat at this time of year.

And we’ve got several days coming in this same balmy mode. it’s not going to get above 90 until next Wednesday.

And I am grateful. That God should reward me (and my neighbors) this way after my grumbling (a bit) about missing out on the Great White North, or about the lack of cold tap water, is a glorious example of His infinite forgiveness.

The last couple of days, I’ve even resumed walking outside. And I intend to do it again today. I can’t wait…

Yeah, I know this is a couple of days late, but when the heat was at its peak, I didn’t feel like writing about it. It had to get a little cooler first.

A week or two back I was at the beach, and since the Surfside Beach library is constantly getting rid of books, bless them, I picked up some they were selling for about three for a dollar, and one of them was The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. I’d never read it before. For the uninitiated, it’s fiction, but it’s based on (or perhaps I should say it opens with) a real-life attempt to kill Charles De Gaulle. Not one of those lone-gunman things, but a whole team of conspirators who hated him because he had given up control of Algeria. Really, they felt that strongly about it.

Anyway, I just started reading it last night, and was struck by a seemingly mild description of the weather on page 4, reproduced above. Note the key sentence: “Even at 7 in the evening of the hottest day of the year the temperature was still twenty-five degrees centigrade.”

I’ll wait a moment while you look up how “hot” that is in real temperature. When I did that, I learned that 25 degress C is 77 degrees F. I just now glanced at my phone and see that at 8:40 p.m., it’s 85 degrees here. And to my memory, this is the nicest day we’ve had this week. I’ve been out working in the yard, and am sitting here typing hoping to cool off a bit before showering. But Parisians were abandoning the city because on Aug. 22, 1962, it was 77 degrees and they couldn’t bear it. “Hottest day of the year.”

Maybe that was one of the fictional parts of the book. I hope so. Otherwise, we must believe one of two things: Human expectations have changed more dramatically than I had thought, because of global warming. Or, we must assume that when a character on the Simpsons called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” he was actually referring to their wimpiness regarding weather.

Alas, it’s likely the former. When we visited Boston in July 2022, it was delightfully cool in the mornings and evenings and nicely warm at midday, and it was even cooler in Amsterdam last summer. So you can still have nice weather, from a South Carolinian’s perspective, if you go way up north.

But a couple of days ago, it was 102 in Beantown. That same day, it was 100 in Philadelphia. (And last night when I started reading that book, my phone told me it was 78 in Paris in the wee hours of the morning. In June. So, way warmer than 1962, although not impressive to us.)

It wasn’t that hot here — 99 yesterday, I believe, and 98 the day before — but it was miserable enough. Inexplicably. My phone weather apps kept saying the “air quality” was fine, but for me, that was a lie. The Post and Courier was more honest than that a couple of days ago.., Of course, being an old newspaperman I may be prejudiced but for me, it’s been like trying to breathe green pea soup for about a week. Last week, I started having the first asthma trouble I’d had in a very long time. I started taking prednisone this week. I hate the side effects, but it’s got me breathing again. Still, I’ve been staying indoors, until today.

Today was nice. Really nice. I haven’t been sleeping much, thanks to the steroid, but when I got up this morning a little after 6, I didn’t mind. I started picking up branches that had fallen all over the yard, and when I found what I thought was a gumball tree that had come crashing down out back (actually, it was just a tree-sized branch of a huge one in my neighbor’s yard), I attacked it with relish. A brush saw, a pole saw, two pairs of loppers and a chainsaw, which I wore out. Had to order a new chain. Filled up the bed of my truck, and there’s enough left to fill it again after I haul it to the recycling center this weekend.

While I was working in the morning, it was about 73, I think. (My phone, to my great disappointment, never tells me was the weather was, it just makes predictions about the future, and doesn’t own up when they turn out to be wrong. Kind of like a lot of political writers.)

I hope you had a good day, too….

Edward Fox was the Jackal in the 1973 movie, which was odd. He’s usually a good guy, right?

Coming home from Mass Sunday night, I saw what you see in the picture above — a strange, dull, red sun in a hazy sky, far too high to be that color.

Stopping at a light to take the picture, I pointed out that there was an odd haze in the air, “and not a purple one, either.” It wasn’t just the sun; it was barely detectable as I looked down Sunset Boulevard ahead of me. I asked my wife to check her weather apps.

She said one of them reported that wildfire smoke could be expected Monday morning. “Well, it’s here now.”

I suppose it’s a measure of how little I pay attention to news these days, so when I ran across this in The Washington Post this morning, I had to look for something tying it to South Carolina. I found this:

Smoke from Canadian wildfires moved into the Palmetto state this weekend. Most of the smoke particles and ozone associated with the fires are present at higher elevations in the atmosphere, but the added pollution from the fires also contributes to an increase in ground level ozone. Local weather conditions are also contributing to an increasing in ground level ozone. The stable layer of air near the surface and the light winds in the upstate Monday are preventing mixing and allowing ozone levels to build up.

I guess that’s what it was. There was a time when I would have been aware of this earlier, not because of looking for it, but because, well, local newspapers used to go sort of nuts over weather phenomena, so I couldn’t miss it. No more.

But the world is still with us, whether covered or not. Interesting that I could see what was happening in Manitoba just driving through West Columbia. Perhaps that red sun had given me, temporarily, one of Superman’s powers.

At least we’re not in North Dakota, something for which I am constantly grateful, whenever the place comes to mind. Which isn’t all that often…

One of the Chinooks providing relief up around Boone, N.C.

A followup on the hurricane post…

Things are still far from normal here in the (relatively) flatlands. Trees that were removed from atop houses (like my mother’s) are mostly still lying on the ground while the tree folks tend to other emergencies. I saw Joel Lourie’s business had to stay closed today for lack of power — as did many others, I’m sure; I just happened to read about that one. And statewide, I heard yesterday, more than 800,000 people lacked electricity.

But the real trouble has apparently been up in the Upstate, and especially in the mountains. The plant where my brother in Greenville works just got power (so did his house). But as I say, the real trouble is uphill from there.

Dave Crockett told us of widespread outages in Oconee. And when you start getting up toward and into North Carolina…

• My eldest granddaughter and her dog (y’all know Dembe) are going to try to drive home in the morning. She’s been pretty much trapped in her neighborhood in Asheville since the storm (you may have heard about Asheville). She’s the one who, as I mentioned before, saw a house float by on the rapidly rising French Broad River just below her house. She never lost power, though. So her phone is charged, she has food and water, and a full tank of gas, and now some roads have opened. But we won’t breathe easy until she’s safely down here with us. Because things are a mess up there.
• I had a series of texts and phone calls yesterday with Samuel Tenenbaum — off and on when he was able to get to a point where there was reception. He and Inez live in the mountainous part of Greenville County now, on Caesar’s Head. Their power is out. They have a generator, but were almost out of the propane that keeps it running. They had managed to get out of their driveway, but they couldn’t come south because Highway 276 was out. He said if there was a medical emergency, no ambulance could get into his community of 90 homes, or the larger neighborhoods of Caesar’s Head. He wanted the governor to send the Guard. I checked with the Guard and found they were already in Greenville County clearing road, but only clearing roads DOT asked them to clear. It was going to take maybe a week or two to get to all the roads up there. Meanwhile, National Guard helicopters flew 28 rescue missions across the state on Sunday.
• I went to the home of my neighbor Mary Burkett, because she’s running for Lexington Two school board, and I wanted one of her signs in my yard. I was greeted by her son Michael, who took my daughter to the prom when they were seniors at Brookland-Cayce years ago, and joined my elder son in forming their first band earlier than that. He said he and his dog — who was still in a nervous state at having a stranger at the door — had been in the mountains for five days, but I didn’t realize until I got home and read his mother’s Facebook page what a harrowing experience they had had. This was up around Boone. Their area was supplied and resupplied with water and MREs by a steady stream of military Chinook helicopters (you know, the big eggbeaters with two rotors) during that time. This morning, a road finally opened (basically, it was rebuilt after parts of it had essentially evaporated) this morning, and he got back home.

Oh, and my wife went to the dentist this morning and the hygienist told her two more storms are on our way. Looks like she might be right, although who knows there those disturbances will end up.

Anyway, what are y’all hearing from friends and loved ones up in the hills?

And I did get that yard sign, to go with my Russell Ott one.

Looking at my weather app to see what I should wear this morning — I’ve been switching back and forth the last couple of days between outfits one would wear six months apart in a sane universe — I saw something I’d never seen before.

I’ve seen advisories about poor air quality before, which warn that people with chronic respiratory conditions — people like me — should probably not spend time outside exerting themselves.

But this was new. I’d never been told the weather is “unhealthy.” Not that I recall. So I clicked for more info. (see image below)

Which was more startling. I’d definitely never seen a warning that “EVERYONE may begin to experience health effects.”

It went on to say that the problem was “particles” that “typically result from wildfires, smokestacks, bacteria, or small dust particles.” Which is not what I would call “specific.”

Wanting to narrow that down, I did something I seldom do — I turned to television weather. No, I didn’t turn on the TV and wait for something to come on telling me about the weather. I’ve never understood how anyone cares so much about weather that they’re willing to do that. I went to a TV station’s website, and called up the most recent weather report.

The guy went on and on and on about temperatures, and wind speeds, and yadda-yadda, and never once mentioned the quality of the air.

My wife assumes it’s the pollen I wrote about yesterday. And she’s out cleaning the deck wearing a mask.

Me, I’m going to do my 10,000 steps today on my elliptical trainer, right here in my home office.

But you know, I’d still like to know what it IS, and what about it caused the app to give me this unprecedented (as well as I can remember) advisory.

So far, it’s just behaving like a mobster in the protection racket in a B movie: “Ya oughta stay inside, if ya know what’s good for youse. Doin’ udderwise could be… unhealthy…”