Purple
First thing I wake up to this morning (aside from, of course, my 19 lb cat sitting on top of my belly with one sleepy eye open and the other still closed, and with a total case of bed-head fur, glaring at me for the fact that I've been sleeping through the alarm for nearly 20 minutes) was the announcement that today in Dallas was to be classified as a level "Purple" air pollution warning.
According to the radio, this is the highest level of warning and one of the first times it has been used. From what I could tell, recommended precaution was about everything except for "Don't breathe."
It's really scary to live in a place like this. Inger says I need to grow some balls and leave. Now. I don't disagree — that first part is, regrettably (and no reflection on my actual physical anatomy, of course), the hard part.
Anyway, I couldn't help thinking at work later on what a strange color choice purple is in the first place. It was presumably added after the air was worse than people thought that a red pollution level could even get, but what's to stop it from being worse than this?
"Today, everyone, be advised that we're under an air advisory Brown. Even those without particular sensitivities should limit outdoor exertion, or may risk losing smaller appendages due to acid rain and corrosive air." (What is these people's deal with "exertion" anyway — polluted air is nasty whether I'm exerting anything or not).
"Warning, Dallas is now under air pollution condition Black. You are currently dead. Please constrain your death to an indoor air-conditioned environment." (Another strange observation — they always specify "indoor air-conditioned environment." If the air outside is that bad, is the air inside much better? I mean, outside is where the inside air comes from at some point, if I'm not mistaken, and I seriously doubt my $1.29 Kroger brand AC filter is qualified to remove ozone, smog, and fumes. Honestly. . . .)
Who knows.
The whole situation actually reminded me of a discussion with a coworker and my director in a status meeting about 3 weeks ago. For lack of any standardized status report format (previous to next week anyway, but that's another long story), but still faced with the obligation to provide written status, we'd each kind of engineered our own template and tailored it to fit our needs. Go, diversity! Looking at the various concepts was kind of like switching style wizards in some kind of publishing software or something (Two Fold Brochure, Three Fold Brochure, Modern Flier, Classic Flier, Traditional Flier, Executive Flier, and so on).
Anyway, I digress. My coworker's status report includes a cell next to each item which is filled with the appropriate status color (green, yellow, red). Just like the pollution advisory people, he started finding the need to add new colors, so one week, all of a sudden there were gray boxes to denote items which were on hold or obsolete. Made sense — no major questions on that.
The following week, however, he showed up with a status report on which nearly every item was either gray (from before), or red (yikes), or black. Our director casually picked up his copy, looked at it, and suddenly shouted, "Holy shit, black?!? What are these, issues that are so bad we've got a body count attributed to them all of a sudden? Jesus!"
It turns out the black items simply denoted issues that had recently been completed, but that part of the story, like, isn't all that funny and stuff.
So, back to the purple air (or perhaps it's radioactive chartreuse by now — I don't know, I haven't been outside since I got here this morning), at least it rained around noon today. Finally. I can't tell you how hot and nasty (and not in that oh so dirty good way — we're talking weather here) and miserable it's been.
My cat even pants when he's outside.
Seriously.
Yeah, I admit he has a lot of extra insulation (19lb is the result of a diet that brought him down from around 23), but that's still pretty extreme. The only time I'd ever seen him do it before was when he got into the leftover queso to which I'd added a ton of jalapeño sauce one day, and it was really funny then. Now it's just sad, because I'm just as hot as he is, I want to do the same. (What would the neighbors say? I and the cat, sitting on the balcony, panting like there's no tomorrow. Wow.)
According to the radio, this is the highest level of warning and one of the first times it has been used. From what I could tell, recommended precaution was about everything except for "Don't breathe."
It's really scary to live in a place like this. Inger says I need to grow some balls and leave. Now. I don't disagree — that first part is, regrettably (and no reflection on my actual physical anatomy, of course), the hard part.
Anyway, I couldn't help thinking at work later on what a strange color choice purple is in the first place. It was presumably added after the air was worse than people thought that a red pollution level could even get, but what's to stop it from being worse than this?
"Today, everyone, be advised that we're under an air advisory Brown. Even those without particular sensitivities should limit outdoor exertion, or may risk losing smaller appendages due to acid rain and corrosive air." (What is these people's deal with "exertion" anyway — polluted air is nasty whether I'm exerting anything or not).
"Warning, Dallas is now under air pollution condition Black. You are currently dead. Please constrain your death to an indoor air-conditioned environment." (Another strange observation — they always specify "indoor air-conditioned environment." If the air outside is that bad, is the air inside much better? I mean, outside is where the inside air comes from at some point, if I'm not mistaken, and I seriously doubt my $1.29 Kroger brand AC filter is qualified to remove ozone, smog, and fumes. Honestly. . . .)
Who knows.
The whole situation actually reminded me of a discussion with a coworker and my director in a status meeting about 3 weeks ago. For lack of any standardized status report format (previous to next week anyway, but that's another long story), but still faced with the obligation to provide written status, we'd each kind of engineered our own template and tailored it to fit our needs. Go, diversity! Looking at the various concepts was kind of like switching style wizards in some kind of publishing software or something (Two Fold Brochure, Three Fold Brochure, Modern Flier, Classic Flier, Traditional Flier, Executive Flier, and so on).
Anyway, I digress. My coworker's status report includes a cell next to each item which is filled with the appropriate status color (green, yellow, red). Just like the pollution advisory people, he started finding the need to add new colors, so one week, all of a sudden there were gray boxes to denote items which were on hold or obsolete. Made sense — no major questions on that.
The following week, however, he showed up with a status report on which nearly every item was either gray (from before), or red (yikes), or black. Our director casually picked up his copy, looked at it, and suddenly shouted, "Holy shit, black?!? What are these, issues that are so bad we've got a body count attributed to them all of a sudden? Jesus!"
It turns out the black items simply denoted issues that had recently been completed, but that part of the story, like, isn't all that funny and stuff.
So, back to the purple air (or perhaps it's radioactive chartreuse by now — I don't know, I haven't been outside since I got here this morning), at least it rained around noon today. Finally. I can't tell you how hot and nasty (and not in that oh so dirty good way — we're talking weather here) and miserable it's been.
My cat even pants when he's outside.
Seriously.
Yeah, I admit he has a lot of extra insulation (19lb is the result of a diet that brought him down from around 23), but that's still pretty extreme. The only time I'd ever seen him do it before was when he got into the leftover queso to which I'd added a ton of jalapeño sauce one day, and it was really funny then. Now it's just sad, because I'm just as hot as he is, I want to do the same. (What would the neighbors say? I and the cat, sitting on the balcony, panting like there's no tomorrow. Wow.)