Hot and Foggy Times These Days

We sure did not have to worry about our take-out pizza being cold by the time we got it home this past week! It was firecracker HOT! There is an old saying that corn should be “knee high by the 4th of July”. With a combination of newer corn hybrids and maybe a touch of global warming, some of that corn was over 6 feet tall on the 4th of July. Some say that you can hear it growing during this time of the year. I would say that it would be a haunted corn field for sure in July rather than October.

Another fact of life this year is wearing face masks. I sure have seen some really pretty ones and wished I had that fabric to whip them up for me. I was late into the making of them but I sure had fun going through my “vintage” fabric stash and picking out fabric to match the people I was making them for. The guys were harder because I did not have a lot of “boy fabrics”. Now I have masks on the east and west coasts and in between. Guess what? I did not make any for myself. That will be another hot day project.

Still another fact of life is wearing one of those things and not have your glasses fog up. You non-glasses people probably never even thought of that. The first time I wore one of my gifted masks was on a humid, rainy day with Margaret Flower and we were social distancing at the Minneapolis Farmers Market EARLY one Saturday morning. I kept walking into the water puddles and bumping into things as I just could not see with the foggy glasses. (There was totally no chance that I could see anything if I removed my glasses.) After a longer period of time than I would have wanted, I tried to pull my mask way up on my nose and it worked! I had been looking at all the other masked people trying to figure out what they were doing to be fog free and I also started asking them before this brilliant idea floated in my brain. I asked Margaret if she would also try it to see if it worked for her and she said that it sure did. Such a brilliant brain I have! (Sometimes.) I have since done some research on that problem and found out the reason us glasses wearers get foggy lenses is that our warm, moist exhaled breath is directed upward to our glasses and the surface tension affects the water molecules. (Most of us do not have totally sealed masks.) This is known as the “surfactant effect”. True glass is said to collect it better than plastic. One way that is supposed to help prevent the fog is to rinse your eye glasses with a soap solution, shake them to get rid of what you can of the soap mixture but do not wipe. Let dry and you should be more fog free. Daughter Nissa Westerberg, PhD, bioanalytic chemist, would be able to do expound on this subject in great depth, but since we are not getting our degree on this subject, we will keep it simple. Plus, we will save 12 years of college work.

With facts changing daily, here is one of the latest I have heard on what type of masks work better than others. That ever popular “they” say that a combination of cotton and silk makes a much better mask than just cotton by itself. The silk is supposed to filter out more of the bad things and make the mask more N95 like. But there is a “but” to this. The mask with the silk has to be a very snug fit as even a one percent leak with take away fifty percent of the value of the mask.

I have a current question. Will we remember or know who the new mask wearing people we meet during the current times be recognizable without their masks? Will we be passing them by on the street thinking they are total strangers once we are mask free? Will a different mask make them different looking even at this time? Will this be the least of our problems?

Bea Westerberg [email protected]

by Bea Westerberg