Saturday, May 12, 2007

Maybe I can get out for a ride tomorrow

I haven't been able to ride the last few days because of all of this smoke. It lightened up on Tuesday, but came back at the end of the week. It's starting to lighten up a bit today though. Looks like I'll be able to get out tomorrow. Here's a picture Beth took yesterday.



No, that's not a view up the street on a misty morning, that's about ¼ mile visibility through the smoke at noon. Definitely not conducive to outdoor activity.

It appears as if the winds are shifting a bit and we may start to see some relief this afternoon.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Running hiatus and Where there's smoke, there's not always fire

Well, I need to take a break from running. I simply can no longer run in my current shoes; it hurts too much. If it's not my knees, it's my hips or my back and I can't really do more than 2 or 3 miles. Since we can't afford to replace them right now, I'm going to take a break until we can. I'll just concentrate on cycling and get my cycling muscles back in shape. Coincidentally, I won a $25 gift certificate to a local running store in a raffle at our company's "wellness fair" yesterday. I'll hang on to that and check the place out; if the prices are good and I like the way they do shoe fittings, I'll get them there. Otherwise, I'll just use it to buy some running gear and get the shoes at the place where I originally planned.

The whole Tampa Bay area is covered with a cloud of smoke today. We have a fairly steady north wind that is pushing smoke from fires in Georgia and north Florida down on us. It's starting to clear out, but this morning it was horrendous; it looked like we were socked in with fog. The smell was overpowering and it worked its way into our building. Everybody has been coughing , I've had this nagging sinus headache all day; it's terrible.
Here's a picture from the newspaper that shows what it was like:


Hopefully, the weather will change tonight and everything will clear up; the weather is supposed to be beautiful all week and we'd love to be able to keep the windows open and the AC off.