Smoky Palo Alto

The other day I woke up and the house smelled intensely of wood smoke.  When I went outside, the smell was almost overwhelming.  A low haze hung over the area and my eyes and throat burned after running.  The last time this happened was during the Summit Fire in Santa Cruz this May.

 
It is, of course, well known that over a thousand wildfires were sparked throughout Northern California by dry lightning storms last week. What I couldn't understand about the past week is that there are no nearby fires, yet the smoky haze has been far worse over the past week than it was at the height of the Summit Fire.  So where is all the smoke coming from?  Looking at the MODIS site, I found an answer. This is the picture of the day from 29 June and it is pretty stunning.  The smoke from the Napa, Shasta, and Mendocino County fires was just funneling down through the the San Francisco Bay Area.  Yikes. 

Things have been a bit better over the last couple days but it is still disturbingly overcast and hazy. I fear it is going to be a very long summer...

Nothing But Nets

A piece in today's New York Times notes that the existence of $10 bed nets makes charity for malaria easy, cool, and almost addictive.  Our kids' school ran a Nothing But Nets fundraiser this spring.  I had the privilege of giving a lecture to a couple hundred very sharp elementary school kids about what malaria is, how you get it, and what we can do to eradicate it.  

Classrooms competed to see which could raise the most money and, this being Palo Alto, I think there was a lot of money raised.  I also had the amazing experience of clandestinely watching my own son open up his piggy bank one morning before school, pull out his own money (and there's not a whole lot of it in there), and decide to contribute his own $10 in addition to the $100 we had already given his class.  You could see the reasoning being played out on his face: "If I give this $10 bill, I can help save the lives of a family of four.  That's more important than a new Wii game." I was very very proud, to say the least. Providing kids with the opportunity to do good and feel like they are making a difference can lead to some incredible behavior.  Maybe, just maybe, there's hope for us still.