Muggy comfort

Heading through the amber-tinged streets this morning, I turned and saw the all-too-familiar blazing copper penny - for those of you who remember pennies - rising above the buildings.

Victoria has been largely spared the smoke from distant forest fires this summer, so much so that an editor, writing climate-change advice for the Times-Colonist earlier this week, reminded us of the "smoky skies over Victoria a few years back".  I guess he forgot about last September, when the smoke from California, Oregon, and Washington State clumped over Victoria for several days, turning the sun into a merciless, cold, silver disc, and hiking the air quality scale to "10+".  We were never given the actual number, but the air pollution was worse than that which plagues Beijing.

The air quality this time is a "moderate risk" 4; it was 6 yesterday evening.  It's a kind of cold comfort (well, muggy, anyway) that we are grateful to not be Beijing.

Or under a heat dome.  Seven weeks ago, I noticed the cat, splayed on the windowsill of our north-facing bedroom at 7 am.  Never a good sign.

It was a bit like the analogy of the boiling frog - each day, for about three days, it was a little bit hotter, so the night-time was not long enough to cool off, and we'd start each morning at a higher temperature, with a white-hot sun rising into the pitiless light-blue sky.

It was as if Hades had stalked us to the west coast:  the Ottawa-like social isolation brought on by the pandemic, and now, an Ottawa summer humidex in the mid 40's -- unheard of in Victoria. Butchart Gardens closed.  The University of Victoria closed.  Smaller businesses closed after midday.

On our wedding anniversary, I went to escort Demeter back to our place, and was smote by the heat whenever I stepped out of the shade.  It's a short walk, but my mother is 91, and using a walker.  We daren't jaywalk, so we had to make the loop to cross at the signals.  Demeter balanced an old-fashioned coolie hat on her head.  I learned later that, at that time, the temperature - not the humidex, but the actual temperature - was 39 degrees Celsius.  At 6 pm.  On Fairfield Road.  Eight blocks from the ocean.

Nope.  I'll take the blazing penny over a dome, any day.