Up in smoke

Apparently, it's been very dry lately. I haven't really noticed much because it doesn't rain a lot this time of year. Or, rather, this is the time of year when it's starting to rain a lot. Normally. But I guess it's been unusually dry lately, so half of Florida is on fire. Seriously, look at this map.

Each red flame represents a fire. Luckily, there aren't many around here, but that's probably only because there are no forests to burn. But I'll tell you what there has been a lot of: wind. The wind has brought the smoke from all these wildfires down here. It's been smoky outside almost continuously since early this week. It's been hard to go outside sometimes. It's worse in the northern part of the state, where my aunt had to evacuate her house.

The smoke let up during the day on Thursday, which actually turned out to be kind of convenient. This year they started something new at school called the Class Wars. You know how, in the Harry Potter movies, the teacher asks a question and Hermione says the right answer, and the teacher's like, "10 points to Gryffindor"? It's kind of like that, except each class won points throughout the year for doing school-spirit related things like... I don't know what. Going to games, I think. I didn't earn any points for my class. But apparently we seniors got the most points by far throughout the year, so we won a field day.

It was Thursday afternoon and it was on the football field. I had been worried that it would be impossible to breathe, but the smoke cleared up that day, which is either fortunate or unfortunate. There was a bounce house, cotton candy (there was wind, much to the chagrin of the cotton-candy-makers), snow cones, a DJ, musical chairs (yeah), a dunk tank (that didn't work half the time), and "jousting" (actually, sparring with soft helmets and large foamy things on an inflatable ring). The only real excitement I found was catching the stray cotton candy that flew away in the wind, but even that got old after a while. The sun beat down and seemed to slow down time. The crowd, which had been small to begin with, thinned as people simply left school or went back to a class (not necessarily their own).

Eventually, I followed suit and went to Mr. Mumtaz's class, which is where I would have been. Of course, he was having a free day because much of the class was supposed to be at the field day, even though a lot of people (including people who weren't in his class to begin with) came back.

Here's Hamlet for the Shakespeare-impaired.

Apparently, potential bank robbers can be scared away by a smile. It sounds like it would be effective in practice, but it would be hard to train bank tellers to be cheery with a gun pointed in their face.