All the smoke and ash in the air from the fires on either side of Los Angeles is turning the sky orange and dumping ash on our cars, even though they’re each 30-40 miles from here. My throat stings and my eyes burn- nowhere close to what our neighbors to the north and to the south east are dealing with, but not fun.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been trying to take better advantage of our neighborhood’s walkability. Our place has a Walk Score of 72 out of 100. Not quite as good as our last place (which had a 92 out of 100), but still very walkable. Of course, we didn’t take much advantage of the walkability of our last apartment, so it didn’t do us much good. Last Friday we walked to dinner 1.2 miles away – there are some places that are closer that we’ve walked to a couple times before, but there are quite a few more places when we open the range to 1-1.5 miles. I also signed up for a gym that’s .8 miles away and doesn’t have a very good parking situation – encouraging me to walk. There really is quite a bit of stuff within just a few miles of us. My office is only 2 miles from our apartment, I really should start getting myself there without a 2,800 pound machine around me, at least some of the time.