Who has got a word for the relief of breathing fresh air after a day of having all the windows and blinds shut against the heat? I missed you, outside world.
Related/unrelated, the clinical name for one of my long covid symptoms is “air hunger”
Tag: climate diary
What counts as lucky in a polycrisis
Reading up on aftercare for chemical weapons exposure and I can’t decide how to feel about the way it overlaps my existing practices for wildfire smoke season… Take the win, I guess.
It really is a relief when the necessary defenses to different aspects of the polycrisis are not in conflict. I remember dealing with wildfires and a heatwave during early covid lockdowns in 2020. Back then before the PNW heat dome, hardly anyone had a/c so we needed to open the windows to deal with heat, but we needed to keep them closed to keep the smoke out. We couldn’t socialize indoors due to covid and couldn’t socialize outdoors due to smoke.
The Beaverton spoke to my heart:
“Marginalized communities are often hit hardest by situations like this,” says Cablebill, “because they do not have easy access to resources that would enable them to be neither in nor outside.”
Crip tips for planet earth
Getting weepy about Violet Affleck pointing out that Planet Earth experiences post-exertion malaise, and people with ME/CFS know the hard truths about how to deal with that.
Because pwME know that a crash is unpredictable and impossible to reverse, the goal of pacing is to not encounter the symptoms at all. Success is measured not by a fast and furious response at the moment of crisis but by the absence of a need for intervention. But US society, like a new pwME still unfamiliar with the costs of PEM, is staring down a cycle of “crashes” from which we won’t be able to easily return
Apocalypse mental health coping strategies
One of my apocalypse mental health coping strategies is choosing silly or celebratory versions of emergency supplies. (Some of my emergency water is carbonated.)
Seeing so many happy people at the new Banfield Park public swimming platform during the heat warning today pushed that same button — it’s a party version of a public cooling station. Big fan.
Notable heatwaves of kid lit
My favourite heatwave / climate change picture book is this one, where one night it is so hot that the moon melts.
It has everything: apartment-dwellers helping each other, a grandma with good ideas, climate refugees (from the moon), environmental restoration, and an ending that is cute and encouraging, or maybe “icy and sweet”.
Gonna go make popsicles and work on my neighbourhood extreme weather prep. Sending courage to my fellow west coasters.
My runner-up favourite heatwave / climate change picture book is this one, where a family is trying to get to the lake but their car keeps breaking down.
A baby is taken seriously as a person with valid ideas, a dad does all the parenting, it’s a solid right-to-repair story, and the car is correctly portrayed as unglamorous and annoying. But the noises it makes are a lot of fun to read.