smog

The smog was so thick yesterday you could cut it with a knife. Wonder how many times I've thought or written that statement? The newspaper moved the weather & air quality report to page 2 of section 2 so it's harder to find. They've made the pollution index into a really small chart and it's in black and white instead of color so you don't notice you've just been through a week of RED days and oh, yeah, yesterday was a PURPLE day! Propagandists at work for the city of Dallas. Well, most of us don't need no stinking chart to know WE CAN'T BREATHE and THE AIR HURTS OUR EYES!

My co-worker and I have started taking walks at night to avoid the heat and pollution. We take a brisk walk around the parking lot and warehouse about 1:30 a.m. after I clock out for the day. It takes about 15 minutes and I think it may be about half a mile. It helps to wake me up so I can be alert for the drive home and Ed says it should help him get through the wee hours of the morning. It won't help him much on his drive home during morning rush hour. The temperature was down to 85 degrees last night (this morning?) but the pollution hadn't let up - we still had a thick haze overlaying the countryside. Part of it may have been humidity from the lawn sprinklers or the nearby canals that run through Las Colinas. I could smell dampness.

Yesterday was a real smell-a-thon. I got behind a garbage truck that was fleeing an abbatoire, blood and stench dripping a gruesome trail on I30 into downtown. On the way home I got an almost unbearable odor from the open sewer they call the Trinity River as I passed through the downtown mixmaster.