South-Central Plaguelands
Yesterday the wind kicked up somethin' fierce (that's a little Southern dialect for you folks reading outside of Dixie). My commanding view of the Hill Country and Lake Austin with the city skyline in the distance became obscured by this massive cloud of brown haze.
I don't know if it was smog blown up from Houston, but I suspect it was a massive, toxic cloud of Cedar pollen. For those of you who don't know, the cedars here cause terrible allergies, and many people who've never had allergies before develop them, sometimes as late as five or six years after moving here (it was five in my case). The pollen season is only a month or two in winter, but it pretty much sucks.
Looking out my window near sunset, the sun was filtered by the pollen cloud to be a plane, sickly yellow orb. It looked for all the world like the skybox from the World of Warcraft "Eastern Plaguelands" zone. By nightfall my allergies were so bad it felt like I had pnuemonia.