The Ring of Fire

With apologies to Johnny Cash, I found "Ring of Fire" playing in my head this afternoon. For DD readers outside southern California:

• Most of life goes on normally. Yes, 500,000 plus have been evacuated. That leaves 19.5 million in place.
• There are less people on the street. As today wore on, the San Gabriel Valley air quality went down. Yesterday, the Santa Ana winds made things very clear. Today, as the strong eastward winds break up, the smoke is swirling around. I had a small amount of ash on my car when I went out at around 3 PM.
  
• Now the sky is a weird orange; it looks like there ought to be a glorious sunset, when its the whole sky that's orange.
• We have the house locked down now (5:45 PM Pacific) and the air purifier on.

By the way, there's no reason to believe that this will affect the TransMin Conference starting Thursday.