3:00 AM: The air reeks of wood smoke and burnt wood. I woke up around this time and hoped to open the windows to cool down this stuffy house. The air is so polluted -- as usual -- we can't! We are prisoners in our own home at three in the morning! This city is a nightmare!
5:00 AM: Faint trace of burnt wood odor lingers in the air. That makes over 11 hours of constant foul polluted air. This is normal in North St. Paul, MN. This is how the city council forces us to live.
7:00 AM: Air is fresh. Time to finally open the windows after having them closed for the past 13 hours.
On a side note, this blog got 497 unique visitors last month. This isn't a record but it isn't bad. People doing broad searches for "city of North St. Paul" and "North St. Paul, MN" are finding this blog ranked in the third and fourth positions on the Google search engine. People searching for real estate and homes for sale are finding this blog, too. Anyone thinking about plunking down $175,000 - $200,000 or more for a house should know how terribly polluted the air is in this city. Imagine paying over $2,000 a year in property taxes to breathe smoky, polluted air every day. We even got a visitor for the search "North St. Paul a good place to live?". The answer to that question is: No, this city is not a good place to live. It is a terrible place to live because of the daily smoke pollution the city council forces us to endure. It used to be a great place to live 10 years ago when nobody burned wood. These days, it is rare to have more than two or three days a month without wood smoke in the evenings. Usually, you have to close your windows and leave them closed all night long because the wood smoke pollution is so heavy.
North St. Paul could become a good place to live again if the city council ever gets rid of this wood smoke pollution. Until then, my advice to anybody considering purchasing a home here is to avoid this city like the polluted nightmare that it is. Moving to North St. Paul could be the biggest mistake you ever make. Consider yourself warned by someone who knows.
4:30 PM: Intermittent faint wood smoke coming from a distance. Cloudy, 80 degrees, spotty rain showers moving in.
5:15 PM: Very faint wood smoke. You can detect a trace of wood smoke if the wind is right.
7:00 PM: No wood smoke.
8:00 PM: No wood smoke. It rained briefly between 7 PM and this time.
9:30 PM: No wood smoke. Last check of the evening. I woke up again around 3 AM to see the ground was wet. It rained again. The air at 3 AM was free of wood smoke. Flickers of lightning filled the sky.
Thanks to the rain we enjoyed an evening with very little wood smoke.