Smoke, COVID and masks
Last Post 11/13/2020 11:02 PM by 79 pmooney. 13 Replies.
Author Messages
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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09/11/2020 04:22 PM
Slept last night wearing an old N95 contractor's mask for the smoke. Haven't opened a window since Sunday night and the air inside is bad but every time I step outside it's "Nope! Staying closed up!" Ate breakfast faster than usual because i have to take my mask off to eat.

(A thought - nose masks so we can breath cleaner air (and expel COVID filtered air) while eating. We're in this for the long haul. Why has nobody figured that one out yet? Yeah, smell is integral to taste but if we get COVID we lose both anyways.) Biggest promoter should be restaurants. Better for their employees, customers, and might help them convince regulators to let them do business.

Read that Portland now has the worst air of any major city in the country right now. AQI ~250 We aren't supposed to see a break until Sunday.

The new normal. ("Normal" in the geometric sense, ie perpendicular to all we have known.)

My birds are feeding like it's the apocalypse. Winter levels of consumption and in summer numbers. I get to see regular battles between alpha hummer, lesser hummers and wasps. All feeding is done in agitation and full time lookout even by Alphie..

Sunday is supposed to be clean air day, flow from the Pacific, It's westerly now but up high. 3 mph out of the west last time I was out. Just blowing back in what we breathed yesterday.
Cosmic Kid

Posts:4209

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09/11/2020 06:19 PM
Read that there are 500k evacuees in OR....unbelievable.

Stay safe, Ben.
Just say "NO!" to WCP!!!!
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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09/11/2020 06:33 PM

Posted By 79 pmooney on 09/11/2020 04:22 PM

(A thought - nose masks so we can breath cleaner air (and expel COVID filtered air) while eating. We're in this for the long haul. Why has nobody figured that one out yet? Yeah, smell is integral to taste but if we get COVID we lose both anyways.) Biggest promoter should be restaurants. Better for their employees, customers, and might help them convince regulators to let them do business.


Clothes pins.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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09/11/2020 07:27 PM

Posted By Cosmic Kid on 09/11/2020 06:19 PM
Read that there are 500k evacuees in OR....unbelievable.

Stay safe, Ben.


That was an oops. The Governor has corrected herself. But there are 40,00 two counties over. Two 100,000+ acre fires close to joining. I think I read that the Oregon fires add up to more than the state of Rhode Island.
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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09/11/2020 08:06 PM
So sorry for you, your neighbors, and frankly for us all. Glad you are safe.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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09/11/2020 10:42 PM

Clothes pins. .

So we should all talk in nasal slang with the letter "n" adorning every syllable. We'd look kinda like birds. I think there is room for real ergo and style improvements but I like the concept. Not sure the world is ready.
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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09/12/2020 08:28 AM
I know you’d be up for this Ben. That’s it, I’m patenting it.

Stay safe.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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09/13/2020 07:23 PM
I see Portland has made the big time. (3) HCs in the immediate area. (Hors Catagorie or in current terms, beyond AQI, ie over 500.

Home sits the middle of a triangle of AQI stations. I wrote a spreadsheet to factor in all three with weighting. 380 at the house. (The station I gave the least weight to is at 511.)
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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09/13/2020 07:35 PM
Oh man you punked us. Vancouver is still sitting pretty as number two in list of worst air quality in world though. The worst part is that with sun hiding behind all that smoke it is bloody cold out. Sweater time. The other day still had fan on in bedroom to create a breeze at night. Now I’m contemplating an extra blanket.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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09/13/2020 08:23 PM
Eugene is a lot worse. 4 stations. 477 to 581.
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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09/14/2020 12:26 PM
Well it seems, having dropped down in ranking we needed to make up for that.

There was an overnight major fire at our pier park, built old-fashioned style with a lot of creosote piles. You can imagine what that does to air quality, which now definitely has an added local flavour. Hint, smells like plastic burning.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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10/28/2020 12:05 PM
COVID - a Dodger testing positive, then coming back to celebrate the World Series win with his teammates mask-less including hugs. Fox News has a positive on a charter flight with a half dozen Fox higher ups. VP Pence seems to be skating on thin ice (and refuses to cancel engagements).

Election day should have some interesting news, some of which will slide under the radar. We usually think of election day as when we get to learn who's in and who's out. This year, it will also be who's positive.

And smoke - our air is good but I am still cleaning surfaces. And will be for a while. Lesson here- next year, airtight covers on everything I can do without for 2 weeks. Because if it isn't covered, every surface, top, sides and bottom, need to be cleaned. In the house. Three times as bad in the garage. Bikes too filthy to handle, let alone ride. Everyday I find more stuff that hasn't been vacuumed or wiped. Yes, 1st world problems, trivial compares to what many of my fellow Oregonians have to face. And next year I will be much better prepared. I have a new respirator and a box of filters. A carton of furnace filters. Been cleaning my garage and found a package of 3m N95 masks, the ordinary (quality) masks I've been wearing for decades. (I had no idea they were "special"; they simply were good against fiberglass and asbestos dust and fit my face well.)

Funny, on the other forum a regular posted a thread (The end is near") re: a vaccine. I keep thinking apocalypse when I see it.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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11/11/2020 07:56 PM
Random observations on smoke and COVID. I still have smoked surfaces in my house, lots. Getting better. But every surface that hasn't seen a sponge or vac still has the oily smoke film. That's vertical and undersides too. Monday I flipped my bed and cleaned the underside, the floor under and all 6 surfaces of the plastic boxes for wool under. Last two nights were the first of not smelling wood smoke all night.

Election fever. The energy at the White House election night was so high that several took that positivity home.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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11/13/2020 11:02 PM
Trump nailed it, We've turned the (COVID) corner. We were riding up the gentle uphill of the valley. Right around elections, we took a right turn. We are now climbing the canyon wall. We hit 100,000 new cases/day 11/4. 163,000 yesterday. And we're only 2 km into this climb. No GPS. No idea where the summit is.

We could place bets on the month we will hit the US WW2 deaths plus yes/no on the Civil War. My money's on June for WW2 (but we need some serious shut downs to get there).


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