California fires, the final confinement!

In March we got told that we could not go anywhere because of the pandemic. So I have been staying at home essentially every day, except to visit my grandparents from time to time. The only “adventure” out of the house is with my parents every evening for a bike ride. And I must say that every day I have been looking forward to our family outing.

But then late August we started having fires raging across California State. The first few days were fine but rather quickly the air quality started deteriorating, and we could smell the smoke pretty much nonstop.

I thought that it would be like a big barbecue and I quite enjoy staying in the smoke, but that turned out to be a gigantic barbecue where the amount of smoke was just ridiculous.

After a few days my mum started coughing nonstop, then my dad started having headache, and next thing I know is that our daily excursions on a bike were cancelled.

I started looking at my app called PurpleAir which provides an instant index of the air quality where you live. Of course 0 is best, with perfect air. And the max goes to 500 which is essentially toxic air with a must stay home order. Anything above 50 is quite bad, at 100 you feel dizzy. At 200 you cant go out unless you wear mask. At 300 you should seriously stay home and leave the house only for emergencies.

These past few days, we had an index of 400… that was really bad and we were all feeling sick. We put some air fans inside the house to clean out the air, we closed all the windows and we did not go out for like 4 days in a row.

Then the most crazy thing happened. For 2 days, the sky turned completely red, like if we were living on Mars. The fires were really close, and all the ash was in the air. It felt like the sky was on fire and it was rather scary.

After a few days the air got better, and now we can go out once again. But that lasted 29 straight days, and I can not imagine going through this every year. But most importantly, I feel blessed that I still have my house. Many people across the state are not so lucky.