Great questions! The short answer is yes: the val namespace can act as a persistent key/value store. Type write `@me.citationCount = 7` anywhere in your code, and that will work. The downside is that this is a global store of state, so it's harder to build composable functions that have persistent state. We're working on designs for this!
You are totally right about the fire season script getting annoying. We should probably also have some mutable state there so that it only notifies you once when it goes above the threshold and then once when it's back safe again.