Smoke and Critters

The Ontario wildfires are doing a number on the northeastern section of the North American continent.

In the province itself, homes are engulfed and destroyed in minutes. Evacuations continue, but the province is running out of places to put people who have lost everything. Fire fighters are doing their damnedest, but many of the fires are raging out of control.

On Tuesday, Alter Ego's cover artist Jo-Anna posted a picture from her house. A sulfur-yellow cloud engulfed her neighborhood. You could barely see the house across the street in the weird haze. She lives in a small town roughly halfway between Detroit and Toronto, well out of the path of the actual fires.

Unfortunately, the jet stream is dragging the smoke from Western Ontario to the Atlantic.

Yesterday, gray smoke enveloped my current residence. We live about an hour south of  Toledo, Ohio. The air quality index ("AQI") was 276. The dogs want to dally, but if the smoke badly affects my eyes and sinuses, I can only imagine what it's doing to my precious puppies.

Today isn't better. The AQI was 287 when I checked my phone. The dogs still want to dwaddle outside, but there's a chemical scent to the smoke that concerns me.

Hell, even our solar panels are only generating half of what they should be on a July day. 

The sad part is there was a time when the U.S. would have sent crews up to Ontario to assist our Canadian siblings, just like they and Mexico would send additional fire fighters to assist with our own blazing countrysides.

Now, the rule in D.C. is every person for himself. Now, everyone suffers.

But we got a little lesson and some hope last night.

As I reported, Jane Doe Jr. had a baby. And the new fawn on the block thinks my flower beds are an all-you-eat buffet. But the queen doe of our yard's fluffle also likes munching on the flower bed. The deer and the rabbit ate side-by-side for a few minutes while Jane Doe Jr. watched from the other side of the wire fence running along the back of our lot.

Then the pair decided to play tag. DH tried to get shots of them, but this was the clearest. The gray mass near the fawn's butt in the queen rabbit's butt. The pair played in our yard for a quite while before the fawn trotted off with her mother.

For the first time ever, DH has named the backyard wildlife. The new fawn is now Bambi. The queen bunny is now Thumper.

And if Bambi and Thumper can eat a meal and play together, they rest of us can, too.