nobody look, it's all boring air quality stuff again

Today I learned that you can't easily find a typical Tucson winter inversion top height online. I just want to know roughly how high I have to go up Mt. Lemmon to get out of the smoke this weekend, but what I'm doing isn't working. I mean, 3500 ft? 6000 ft? I'm not going to know how to dress or what campground to try, although with any luck, the bedroom will still be safe enough that I won't have to camp out.

In other news, I'm feeling ok now because I'm high on chocolate, so here's how my new tent is progressing:

• If you are screwed up on smoke and cut a perfectly good tent part in half (seriously), that joining stitch they showed you when you bought the sewing machine really can attach the two pieces together with a minimum of puckering.
• Synthetic zippers stink. So far, I've washed them in the sink with All five times (or maybe seven, I lost track), let them sit for a couple of months, and boiled them for probably six or eight hours, and they still smell like some kind of petroleum product. I'm trying the overnight soak with ridiculous quantities of baking soda, but then I'm going to give up and try never to sleep with my nose near the door of the tent. Or maybe a lot of alcohol. On the zippers, I mean.

And I wore my particulate filters running this afternoon, but I still got a huge calf cramp. The carbon/particulate filters are too heavy to run with, but I bet I can see over them on a bike.

I think that because I was out trying to ride my bike with just the particulate filters at 5:05 pm, when it was 72 ^oF outside. I smelled smoke at 5:08.

Update 12/12: a couple of trips around the washing machine with ammonia removed a lot of the remaining smell from the zippers, so I have a tent now.