Look closely and you can see a tiny bit of blue in between the heavy cloud cover that has been around for days. However, following my taking this photo, any slight hint of sun has totally disappeared. The long-range forecast now is for even heavier cloud cover for the next two or more weeks... So much for our Solar room and passive Solar heating doing what it's supposed to do in Winter.

Today marks the last "warm day" in 2022, with a high that got almost up to 50 degrees. However, temperatures will now be headed rapidly downward; with BELOW zero Fahrenheit (UNDER minus 18 Celsius) expected to hit in just a few more days. Once that happens, the extreme bitter cold will stick around for an indefinite period of time.

So much for my continuing to open the windows of the house for a little while every day to try to air out the smoke smell from the kitchen accident.

On top of continuing to constantly clean to get rid of the smoke, we now have to also think about bringing as many plants from the Solar Room into the main part of the house as we can. The extra work never ends. As a result, Christmas at our house seems to have been put on hold. I have hundreds of plants in the Solar Room that need to be moved. Plus, I refuse to give up in restoring our home to the close to odorless, pleasantly breathable condition that it had been in prior to Black Friday.

Being unheated, the Solar Room will drop below freezing. Even with space heaters running full blast, a mostly glass room cannot maintain a livable temperature when there are unrelenting heavy clouds and zero outside temperature (along with heavy winds) for a prolonged period of time. Tropical plants absolutely cannot survive such conditions. These conditions are expected to start this weekend. If we had some daytime sun, the problem wouldn't be as bad. But with no sun for the past week and no sun for the next two weeks, the Solar Room definitely will get very cold.

Anyhow, today was pleasant enough to open windows and comfortably step outside for a while. Tomorrow and the immediate weeks to follow won't be. I truly enjoyed the "nicer weather" (brief as it may have been) while I had it. Now, we must face what's next. We are more fortunate than a lot of other people in the US who are getting blizzard conditions or else destructive tornados during December 2022's wacky, rather unstable weather conditions. Just wish we didn't have the smoke problem indoors on top of worrying about my houseplants. Just wish, I could have finished my normal Christmas decorating and were able to sit down to enjoy it.