Sun in smoky skies

This is what the sun looked like this morning (and the past several mornings and evenings). A friend in Sacramento wrote on his blog that the wildfiresmoke was reminding him of his childhood, when the rice farmers used to burn the rice stubble every fall. It's funny to be nostalgic about air pollution, but the memory of those distinctive rice-burning days is somehow pleasant for me too.

Here in the East Bay, the smells are not so reminiscent (most of the smoke is actually blown up into the valley), but today it was cold, and with the hazy skies, it really felt like autumn. I heard a firefighter on NPR say that the fire conditions are like those not usually seen until October. Generally this early in the season you'd have the fires cooling off at night and not so much completely dry vegetation. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the summer.