"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Just briefly: I flew home from Portland today. As soon as we crossed into California, smoke became visible from the scores or hundreds of fires ignited by lightning over the weekend. I managed to roughly match three images I took from my flight to three satellite images of the same general region shot yesterday by NASA. I’ll try to refine later, but the sight of all the smoke–so much that everything here in the Bay Area reeks of it–was truly stunning.
Technorati Tags: california, fire
Well, I see I’ve missed our summer solstice by a day. It was too hot here to pay attention. Yesterday, the unofficial Holly Street high was 101–the hottest I’ve seen it since we moved in 20 years ago. The bonus: It stayed lovely and warm out all night, no sweatshirts needed. More of the same today. Just 9:30 in the morning, and it’s already in the 80s. One of the toughest bike rides in all of California, maybe the entire United States, is being held today: the Terrible Two. A series of precipitous climbs and descents through hot interior Sonoma County (mostly). My heart goes out to the 250 or 300 people who are out there; I’ve done daylong rides through heat like that, and for me it’s just something you have to survive.
And now: Running to Oakland airport to get on a plane to Spokane, Washington. My friend Pete is doing the Ironman Coeur d’Alene tomorrow, and I’m there as his official rooting section and post-event driver. Go Pete!
More from up north.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, berkeley weather
Sunday evening, on the way home from Eugene. We were in the Grand Caravan (174,000 miles); Thom and his friend Elle were driving a U-Haul truck somewhere ahead of us. We got down into the Sacramento Valley just before sunset. On the way north Friday, we had seen a big fire burning in the mountains to the west. A northerly wind had been blowing for several days and carried the smoke well down the valley. By Sunday, the wind had shifted to the southwest, and a long tail of smoke was visible in the northern valley. Just after sunset, a big tower of smoke came up from the fire, and we pulled off to take pictures. This is on Road 7, in Glenn County, just south of the Tehama County line (the “tower” or “puff” or whatever it was is visible in the left center; the clouds in the distance are smoke from the blaze, which I later learned was called the Whiskey fire, near the town of Paskenta, in Mendocino National Forest. It burned about 8,000 acres–a relatively small fire by California wildland standards).
Technorati Tags: california, interstate 5
Here’s an “is it just me?” question: Over the last three weeks or so, I’ve seen a blitz of spam to my main email address that I have never seen before. The come-ons are the same, mostly, but with one significant difference: They’re addressed to me by name, and they use my middle name. Some use my home address as well. I find this vaguely disquieting, even though I know that information is public, somewhere or other (but not on Google. There are zero matches for my full name on Google). Associating my full name with my email–not such an easy trick, which leads me to believe that somewhere or other I made this information available (or perhaps some “secure” database somewhere was compromised).
Anyway, back to the question: Anybody else getting personalized spam.
Just up the street from KQED, where I’m learning how to do radio news. This was tonight, on my way up Mariposa Street after buttoning things up for the night. This Italian-American and a nearby Slovenian-American hall have made me wonder whether you could put together a little display on San Francisco ethnic clubhouses.
Technorati Tags: san francisco
A late spring project for the teacher in the house: Raising some anise swallowtail caterpillars/butterflies. We’ve got three in a nice little plastic crate habitat on the dining room table. The two visible here (on some fennel, one of the species’ preferred foods) are both in their chrysalises now; a third one that didn’t look like it was going to make it developed later and looks like it will go into its chrysalis soon. Two things about these bugs: One, despite growing up with the “knowledge” that moths come from cocoons and butterflies from chrysalises, I’ve never seen the process in action before (Elle, a friend of Thom’s, brought over a bunch of fennel that had caterpillar eggs on the branches). Two, though I’ve seen this creature in both caterpillar and butterfly form, I never had any idea that they were associated (mostly) with the fennel that grows everywhere here.
Technorati Tags: berkeley
Because California has joined the national movement to hold presidential primaries no later than the beginning of the previous year’s Christmas shopping season, we had two primary votes this election cycle. On SuperDuper Tuesday, we voted for presidential candidates and a slew of ballot measures. Yesterday, we voted on state legislative races, a couple more initiatives, some local officials, and party central committee members. (Not that I know who the members of the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee are, and not that I understand what it is they do. I voted for one yesterday, Wes Van Winkle, because–I know someone who uses this method for betting on horses–I like his name. He didn’t win.)
I felt blasé about the election. I didn’t have any strong feelings about anyone or anything on the ballot. When I finally overcame my inertia to go vote late in the afternoon, the polling place was deserted. The poll workers acted like they hadn’t had much business all day (someone commented that I was the 57th person to vote for the day; they had been open for 10 hours at that point). This is in Berkeley, where people miss no opportunity and spare no effort to express their opinions.
I don’t know the city turnout. But countywide, 24.24 percent of registered voters cast ballots (that includes mail-in/”absentee” ballots). Pretty anemic, but better than the statewide figure, 22.2 percent. In our SuperDuper primary, 57.7 percent of registered voters participated, and 60.1 percent in Alameda County.
That February vote got a lot of attention because of the high turnout. It’s true that it was the highest in a long time (see the California Secretary of State’s table (PDF file) of primary election statistics going back to 1910). But if you go back to the 1980 primary, 63.3 percent of registered voters turned out–perhaps because of the presence on the ballot of Proposition 13, the initiative that slashed property taxes in the state and helped make it much, much harder for counties to raise them. Or maybe not: 1980 itself marked the beginning of a long term trend toward lower primary turnouts in presidential years. The primaries from 1964 through 1976 all recorded turnout from 70.95 to 72.6 percent.
Of course, if you look at yesterday’s statewide participation in terms of percentage of eligible voters, it’s much lower. California has about 23 million people qualified to go to the polls; about 16 million are registered. Yesterday’s turnout was just over 3 million, or a shade over 13 percent. I never thought that by voting I’d be in an exclusive club.
Technorati Tags: california, elections
One of my favorite backyard projects in Berkeley: a house a few blocks from us that has (or shares) a stand of big eucalyptus trees (gum trees if you’re speaking Strine). Some time ago–two or three or four years ago, or maybe more than that–someone took it into their head to take down one of the trees. There are crews around here that do that work. We hired one to take down our big Monterey pine when it was sick and near giving up the ghost. The people who do this are experts, and it’s both breathtaking and a little heart-breaking to see how quickly they can bring a tree down. Since they’re working in the middle of the city and simply felling the tree is not an option, they start at the top and take it down in pieces. For really big jobs, crews use cranes to lower sectiions of the tree to the ground, where workers cut them up with chainsaws.
Someone tried that approach on the tree here, but they went about it in a somewhat crazy way. Instead of moving up the tree with a belt and sling apparatus, they lashed a series of ladders to the trunk to gain access to the upper limbs. It must have been a hair-raising climb. Whoever was attempting this feat of urban forestry gave up after lopping off some big branches (they never got into the crown of the tree. As I said, that was years ago. But the partly dismembered tree and ladders remain. (Click the image for a larger version.)
Technorati Tags: berkeley
The dog and I took a walk today–2.7692 miles if a map of the route is to be trusted. The dog, who also answers most of the time to the name Scout, has been here just over two years. I’ve been mentally working up a statistical profile of his life since he joined our household. Just a rough idea of the major points:
Walks: Scout is some kind of mix–probably border collie and a bigger dog called a flat-coated retriever. His appearance says so for one thing. And for another, flat-coats are reputed to be calmer than collies, and Scout is generally very calm. Of course, the daily walking regimen has something to do with it. Since we were sure when we found him that we had a dog that needed a lot of exercise on our hands, we’ve made sure he gets out for three or four walks a day, every day. All told, he probably averages a couple hours a day out with us. And if we cover between 2.5 and 3 miles per hour, that means he (and we–though Kate and I generally split the walks) put in 5 or 6 miles a day with the dog. Over two years, 730 days-plus, that comes to somewhere between 3,600 and 4,300 miles.
Food: He gets something like 3/4s of a pound of food a day (mostly dry), not counting stray corn chips from the kitchen floor, sidewalk snacks, and daily lawn grazing (he’s got an amazing nose for food that others no longer have any use for). Over 730 days, we’re talking about 540 pounds of dry food. (You look at his 55-pound body and wonder where it goes. Stay tuned.)
Food–the Sequel: In Berkeley and other places that kid themselves they’re civilized, it’s the law that you have to pick up your dog’s dumps (prized though they may be by discriminating members of the strolling public). The accessory of choice for this chore is the little plastic bags that home-delivery newspapers come in. In some city parks, it’s common to see garbage cans full of tied-off New York Times delivery bags; in some city parks, there are special self-locking receptacles for this kind of refuse (I often think about what a future civilization–the one we imagine pawing through our garbage dumps in 2,000 years–will make of the garbage strata that contains all the nicely wrapped dog crap; I also wonder how long the nicely wrapped crap will maintain its freshness for future garbologists).
OK–all those walks I mentioned above are punctuated by stops. Stops for Scout to inhale the fragrance of his kind and to add his own to the mix; stops for squirrel staredowns; stops for unexplained noises in the bushes; stops to sample discarded school lunches; and stops to crap. No, I don’t weigh the crap. But my impression is that Scout performs this function dependably two or three times a day (never inside, and that’s a fact; the one time he came close, we were staying in a motel; he work me up in the middle of the night to take him outside). Let’s say he goes 2.5 times a day. So over 730 days, that’s … 1,825 responsibly retrieved and wrapped up dog leavings.
And on that note, I’ll also wrap up this tour of the quantitative dog’s life. (Though I wonder if I can figure out how many bales of fur he’s left around the house in the last two years.)
I have not been on the bike a lot this year, and it shows. I’m heavier and slower. Mostly, I feel “c’est la vie.” I was in great shape by the end of last summer and able to ride about as long as I wanted and as hard as I wanted. Or so it seems from nine months’ distance.
But still. I went out for a ride today with one of my local riding friends. The “classic” start to a ride from my house involves going up into the hills and a street called Grizzly Peak Boulevard; riding that way involves a long, sharp hairpin if you took a look at a map. About a mile north, up the side of the north-south ridge that rises east of Berkeley and then at the top you double back close to but not quite at the top of the ridge. After another couple miles you hit the city limit and cross, oddly, into a piece of Oakland that lies just above the upper hillside reaches of the University of California campus. It’s all open land up there: eucalyptus groves and grass and brush. The road winds up the upper slopes of what on the local U.S. Geological Survey maps is labeled Frowning Ridge. The view down across Berkeley to the bay, San Francisco and the Golden Gate beyond, is still transfixing a good 30 years after I first saw it. The road tops out at about 1,700 feet above sea level — nearly 1,600 feet above my house, and about six and a half miles above sea level. It’s an amazing climb to have right out my front door–long and never really steep, with one of the best vistas in the state.
After you hit the top, the road immediately starts down. You’re headed south, so the logical destination, if you’re going anywhere, is the network of roads that leads into the Oakland Hills; then maybe further south and east through more hills and open country. Today, we rode down to an over-stripmalled suburb called Castro Valley, got a cup of coffee and a scone, then got on our bikes and rode back to Berkeley. Great day out, though unseasonable, if we really do have any seasons around here. We were in the mid-90s the week before last, and that’s sort of freakishly hot around here. Today, at midmorning, it was 48 up in the hills, and it stayed in the low 50s virtually the entire time we were on the bikes.