Category: Berkeley

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Late-Shaking News

A little reminder of where we live: we had a 5.6 magnitude earthquake this evening, centered about 40 miles or so south of us. I was sitting in my office with my laptop (where else?), trying to do a simple project for Kate. First there was a rumble as the older, front portion of our house started to shake; then the back, which unlike the front is built on a slab, started to shake, too; and things kept rattling, the dog started barking, and I heard Kate, on the phone with Thom up in shake-free Eugene, exclaiming about the experience. In all, the episode lasted about 15 seconds.

I think about earthquakes, for which we and most of our fellow citizens are probably woefully underprepared, pretty often. Several times I’ve awakened to a loud shaking in the house, so sometimes I wonder as I fall asleep whether I’ll be jolted awake in the night. In waking hours, they’re pretty far from my mind. But I always have the same thought as the realization dawns we’re having a quake: How bad will this be?

Tonight: 15 seconds is plenty long to start wondering whether this is more than the hills up yonder having a little stretch. The biggest recent quake that most people outside the Bay Area have heard of, the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 17, 1989, lasted 17 seconds. The longest I’ve ever felt was one that woke me up just after noon one day in April 1984. The epicenter was a good 60 miles away, and the magnitude was a not-devastating-sounding 6.0 or so. But it lasted for about 40 seconds and unnervingly seemed to get stronger as it continued. For a nightmarish comparison, the earthquake that hit Mexico’s western coast in September 1985 and triggered building collapses in Mexico City (about 220 miles from the epicenter) is said to have lasted three minutes. That’s long enough to start believing the shaking will never stop, long enough to make you permanently lose your faith that the ground’s an essentially stable, solid thing.

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Class of ‘0-Something

Back from Chicago last night. This afternoon, I walked up to campus — here, that automatically means UC Berkeley — for an appointment with an undergraduate advisor in the College of Letters and Science. Mission: to see what I need to do to finish my bachelor’s degree.

Yes, we have no B.A. I went to school back between 1974 and 1980, but never finished. That never seemed to affect my life or work prospects because I was lucky enough to get real experience right out of high school in a field, daily journalism, that hardly asked what college you went to or what you did there as long as you had the fire and the talent for the work. And for a long time, that was enough. When I left daily print journalism in the mid-90s, my resume was my degree, and for a while, that was enough. But at this point — having bounced around online journalism, TV news, magazine editing and writing, and some marketing stuff, among other things; and having watched that daily print news world I came from wither — I’m thinking of other things I might do (I’m told I’d make a great history teacher if I can avoid scuffling with the students), and that resume is no longer enough. And beside all that, I admit it’s always bothered me a little to have that uncompleted task out there.

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Post-Storm

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We had the lightest brush yesterday with a big storm that really belted Northern California and Oregon: just some light showers late in the morning and early in the afternoon. Still, rain in the Bay Area in mid-October, especially after a dry winter last season, is welcome; and the first half of October has been pretty wet, by our standards — we’ve had two and a half or three inches of rain already.

Anyway, the picture: We took the dog out before the sun was down, and the after-storm clouds were dramatic as always: piles of low cumulus or stratocumulus beating to the northeast with a higher level of cirrus drifting south.

Today’s main project: I’m off to Chicago. My dad’s getting out of his rehab hospital after breaking his hip about a month ago, and I’m going to stay with him for a week to see if I can help out. More from there.

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Memories of Suction Past

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Not that you could get a coffee-table book out of it, but every few weeks or oftener I encounter a used-up vacuum cleaner put out to pasture somewhere in town. Today’s example: a canister model apparently abandoned on the sidewalk along Monterey Avenue. What’s going on with these things? Maybe they’re too awkward to throw out — the trash haulers probably won’t take them in the regular weekly pick up. Maybe there’s some sort of emotional attachment that might equate discarding a well-loved vacuum cleaner with taking a pet to be put down. Maybe the vacuum owners have talked themselves into believing that their old machines still have a few months of useful life left in the service of some thrifty passer-by. Maybe all of the above.

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Monday Report

Today’s weather:

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Port

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We took the ferry over to the city on Friday night and met Sakura and Eamon to celebrate his birthday. The boat left at 6:55, in the midst of a beautiful, post-storm twilight. Just as the ferry ride is always an event for me — the Bay and its shoreline are even more striking than usual from out on the water — the industrial art of the port and its machinery always makes an impression.

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Cutting Back

I spent the morning cutting back the potato vine we have growing on a little trellis on the south side of our back porch. Cut it way back. It had long since moved up and over the edge of the porch roof and was getting ready to start across the roof of the main house.

So I whacked it back to just the main stems and wound those poor bare things through the trellis. Hard to believe it’s still vital, but our yard is full of things that have survived my ministration. My vision is that some lush new foliage will emerge and replace the dead-looking sticks that for the last two or three years anyway were all you could see on the trellis.

Not that the dead-looking sticks were lifeless or unproductive. The last two springs, bird nested there. Last year, a pair of towhees, who couldn’t figure how to tend their eggs and keep away the scrub jays at the same time. The scrub jays got the eggs.

This spring, the scrub jays built a new nest, higher up toward the porch eave, well protected from the sun and out of the way of intruders. Not even the jays could fly straight to the nest; they would fly around to the inside of the porch, onto the potato vine, and up to the nest in two or three hops.

I’m not sure how their brood made out. I know for sure they had one good-size fledgling, but I suspect from watching the adults that it got out of the nest early and took refuge in some bushes alongside our driveway. How it made out after that, I don’t know. I’m reminded of Lillian Gish looking out into the dark in “The Night of the Hunter” and saying, “It’s a hard world for little things.”

Looking at the nests, which I extracted from the trellis as I took the vine down, it’s hard to believe more than one of anything could thrive within. My cupped hands could easily hold either one. The towhee’s nest is a loose affair of sticks, lined with grass; it was held in place by the happenstance of the surrounding vine. The jay’s nest seems to have been tightly woven into a sort of platform of sticks that they might have added to. It’s a beautifully symmetrical bowl lined with pine needles and grass and a single strand of plastic string.

My clean-up impulse means the vine won’t provide enough cover for nests this coming spring.

But the spring after that? Maybe. If the jays or towhees or any other optimistic adventurers want to give that spot a try, we’ll be happy to have them.

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10/10

Just one thing: Twenty-eight years ago, early on a Wednesday morning, I became a dad. Or maybe the better way to say it is that I started to become a dad. Eamon, it’s still quite a journey. Happy birthday!

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Views of Gazelle, California

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Made it back to Berkeley tonight after a perhaps overly ambitious five-day trip up to northern Idaho and back. Total mileage: 2,195. That’s a lot, actually. More details on all that later, perhaps.

In the meantime: On the way south, I had an impulse to get off I-5 south of Yreka to take a couple pictures of Mount Shasta from an overpass. Then I headed down old U.S. 99, which parallels the freeway on the west, and came to the townlet of Gazelle.The pink-painted commercial building on the east side of the road prompted me to stop. According to a couple of local histories, the building was originally part of the Denny-Bar Company, a chain of stores started by three brothers in Callahan, a mining town in the mountains west of Gazelle. One of the histories, “The State of Jefferson,” includes a period picture of the building before the arcade was built onto the front; the date at the peak of the false-front gable is 1898, the same as the modern metal numbers affixed to the same location today. Most of the original details are still visible, though the only evidence the place has ever done business is a Holsum Bread sign painted on the north wall.

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Monday Notebook

The Tragedy of the (Parking) Commons: Nearly everyone I know drives. That means everyone I know parks. I’ll only speak for my own experience, though: The most detestable part of driving is getting stuck in traffic; the second worst, which is almost the same as the first, is parking in a busy commercial district. I love seeing drivers circling blocks or parking lots looking for a choice space: I call that “the great lazy American pastime”; though often enough, even in a place as self-consciously environmentally correct as Berkeley, any space is a choice space.

What’s the cumulative effect of our need to park right now, right next to wherever impulse or necessity have driven us? A piece in Salon this morning, “We paved paradise,” reviews the impacts and possible solutions. One tidbit:

“… [T]here are few frustrations like driving around looking for a parking space, which has its own environmental impacts. [A researcher] studied a 15-block district in Los Angeles and found that drivers spent an average of 3.3 minutes looking for parking, driving about half a mile each. Over the course of a year, Shoup calculated the cruising in that small area would amount to 950,000 excess miles traveled, equal to 38 trips around the earth, wasting about 47,000 gallons of gas, and producing 730 tons of carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming.”

Massive Final Half-Off Double-Points Blow-Out Sale of the Century: I bought something from Performance Bicycle Stores (performancebike.com) at some point, and boy, they sure won’t let me forget it. Here’s how one of my email in-boxes looks this morning:

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That’s 11 sale emails in eight days. Another word for it is spam, and you wonder whether the deals they’re offering outweigh the irritation engendered by the swarm of offers. I rarely open the emails; the main reason is that I’d like to support my local bike shops instead of spending my money with a chain. Performance did open a shop here in the last couple years, though, and I’ll admit I go in there to buy the bike drink mix that I use; the prices charged elsewhere are simply too much of a gouge.

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