Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes. Open mike, thanks for the suggestion about wearing the masks. I think we have some of those. Maybe if I wore one I could catch up on some outdoor work? Not the painting, though, the ash would ruin the finish.

The smoke here seemed a little thinner today.   I could hear the drone of the water bombers passing overhead but wasn't able to see one. My daughter in Saskatchewan wrote that the smoke had reached there. The temperature last night dropped to +5ºC. We're trying to keep the furnace from coming on because it draws "fresh air" from outside and so far inside the house seems okay.

From CBC News site:

Lighter winds and cooler temperatures appear to be reducing the forest fire activity across B.C., but thick smoke continues to cause problems right across Western Canada.

On Friday morning many residents of B.C.'s central Interior woke up to another day of near whiteout conditions, as ash from the fires continued to fall from the sky, leaving the sun a mere orange globe in the sky.

An estimated 75,000 hectares of forest have burned across the province over the past 24 hours, according to fire information office Gwen Eamer....

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/08/20/bc-wildfires-smoke.html#ixzz0xD3m5jAE

rags