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Berkeley: The Weather Record

Mid-November, and the temperature stayed above 70 tonight–“tonight” meaning Sunday night though it’s past midnight now–until well past dark. The forecasts say there are high winds from the north and east just above the tops of our mountains and ridges, and that’s one thing keeping things warm. Walking through the neighborhood this evening, you keep encountering distinct pockets of summery warm air.

Checking the local weather records maintained by the Western Regional Climate Center, I see Berkeley’s record high for November 14 listed as 74, set in 2008. In fact, that 2008 record was the first day in a three-day string of records. On the 15th and 16th two years ago, Berkeley’s highs were 81 and 82 degrees. That 74 record for November 14 was, until today, the lowest high temperature record for the month up to November 21 (the record for that date: 74, set in 1919).

The November 14 record was rewritten today. To what, I’m not precisely sure, because I’m not precisely sure which Berkeley weather station is “official.” I’ve got two candidates.

One is on a rooftop at 2111 Bancroft Way in downtown Berkeley, just west of the southwest corner of the UC-Berkeley campus. Here’s the weather station site, complete with current observations (this is the downtown station that appears on Weather Underground; you can see the enclosure for the station in this Google satellite view). The high at this site today, for what it’s worth: 79.5 degrees.

OK, that’s one. I was led on a wild goose chase for the second potential official Berkeley weather station by a loose reading of a UC-Berkeley website that describes “The Berkeley Weather Station, 1886-present.” The page mentions that this station is an old and established member of the “Cooperative Weather Observer Program (CWOP)”–an effort that Thomas Jefferson dreamed up back in the 18th century. Looking for a listing for Berkeley’s “CWOP” data, I Googled that acronym. Sure enough, there is a Berkeley station listed: CW1634. A couple oddities, though: The latitude and longitude coordinates for that station put it in a residential neighborhood near the Claremont Hotel, a mile or more from campus. A little more poking around, and I established that CWOP also stands for “Citizen Weather Observer Program” and that CW1634 is at a private home with a contact email belonging to the founder of a well-known local software company. The high at this station today: 81.

So, back to “The Berkeley Weather Station.” I tried to track this down before and didn’t quite get there. Thanks to devoting about two and a half hours to just sitting and sorting through different possibilities, I found a page that gives a precise location for the station, which is at 310 feet above sea level, just outside McCone Hall, near Euclid Avenue and Hearst Street. I tried contacting the guy listed as running the observation program in hopes that I could get access to daily data from the station, but I must have said I’m a blogger, and he ignored me. In any case, this is the station that has provided the data that appears in the Western Regional Climate Center tables that include the high temperature records set in 2008.

Not sure what the high was up there today. A project for another time.

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My Beautiful Blogette

I have received an actual message of concern about my lack of posts here recently. More specifically, that maybe the case of poison oak I reported earlier in the month had combined with some kind of drug-resistant pathogen to put me out of action.

First, I appreciate the expression of concern. I haven’t posted anything for ten days, and that may be the longest I’ve kept my mouth shut here since this place went live in 2003. Although this is a desultory and purely personal writing project and I’ve never had a clear idea what it might be leading to or away from, I admit that I’m conscious of the handful of regular readers and often think of this as a letter to them. That also means I’m conscious when I don’t write; I feel like there’s a connection out there I’m not making; and believe me, ten days does seem like a long time.

Second, the poison oak is fine. The heavy-duty pharmaceutical approach I took worked. It turns out prednisone combined with some strong topical steroid can still kick poison oak’s ass. Not that I recommend it; the prednisone made me feel very speedy, and I had a couple episodes at work where I found it very hard to concentrate on anything.

Third, speaking of work: The real reason it has been hard to sit down and write has been the daily demands of the radio newsroom. Hours have been long, and I’m not getting home until late, and it’s been hard to make myself sit down and record the precious, pithy observations upon which this world depends. I’ve been conscious that the number and frequency of my posts has been declining for several months, and that pretty much tracks with new programming we’ve been doing at work that’s led to the higher time demand.

Fourth, if I had been writing the last couple of weeks, I might have scribed items, and still might, about the elections, the Berkeley casual carpool, the World Series, soccer, water, salmon, rain, weather, incredibly warm November days, University of California football, Berkeley’s Measure R campaign, steroids, Zenyatta, Secretariat, and maybe something about The Dog.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been. And I’m still here. And to the person who called to see if I was OK: Thanks..

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Fall Color

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It's our old friend Toxicodendron diversilobum (aka Rhus diversiloba, or Pacific poison oak, or poison oak, or just "goddamn it"), as viewed on a nice hike last Friday afternoon in Redwood Regional Park in the Oakland Hills. I like the seasonal coloration.

You'd think that the ability to easily spot this plant, and its extra visibility as it takes on fall coloration, might arm you against getting a nice dose of this stuff and the attendant nasty, itching, weeping rash. So you'd think. But you must consider in your calculations the fact you're wearing shorts and the presence of a dog who doesn't know from poison oak and what might happen when you pet the dog and let him rub up against you because you're such an affectionate animal person. Add in the possibility that you neglect to wash your hands or shower off after the hike.

Then you get another kind of fall color, in my case running from my ankles up the inside of my legs all the way to where they aren't legs anymore. I had a bad case of poison oak about 30 years ago, contracted while I was digging on a hillside full of unidentifiable poison oak roots. I have been operating under the comforting illusion that I had somehow inoculated myself against a serious recurrence, and have walked for decades in the hills without much concern about Toxicodendron or its effects (not that I'm careless of it–I watch out for it and try to wash if possible if I think I've come in contact with the plant). 

As of this week, illusion gone, for now. The onset of the rash was slow, but by yesterday my lower limbs had blown up to a condition that I call "elephant leg." That's an exaggeration. It's really only "ugly leg." I broke down and called Kaiser, readily got an appointment with my doctor (his schedule had been cleared by patients canceling appointments to go over to the Giants parade in downtown San Francisco), and dragged my unsightly extremities to Oakland. Prescription: a 10-day course of prednisone and what is described as a high-potency steroid ointment. This morning, the ugly is still apparent, but the swelling is going down. I don't lightly resort to such aggressive medical measures, but I'm glad they're there when I want them. 

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Fall Classic: ‘Pitcher’

By Robert Francis, and pointed out to me by Kate (more than once) in the anthology “Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves,” edited by Don Johnson.

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

Of Francis, I find not a lot online. Poets.org doesn’t even include a listing for him, though he was once remarked to be a protege of Robert Frost (he got an obit in The New York Times headlined “Robert Francis, a Poet Hailed by Frost, Dies”). Three years ago, NPR ran a posthumous piece that featured Francis reading some of his work.

As to the poem, well, it gets to the part of pitching that’s hardest to see, even when it’s there in plain sight. You’d think it was the work of what W.P. Kinsella describes as “a true fan of the game.” Here’s what Francis has to say about his boyhood interest in sports in his autobiography:

No need to say that I was not good at any sport. A boy who shrank from the rough-and-tumble of recess would not be one to take to football. Baseball was a little better, but only if the pitcher was not too speedy. I lacked courage, toughness, surplus energy, but I also lacked interest, interest that could have made me a fan if not a player. I never learned a single big-league player’s batting average. Once Father took me to a big-league game in Boston, but my chief impression was the grossness of the free-for-all urinating under the stands between innings.

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Rain

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That’s the view out to the backyard–most of the clutter is out of frame and out of focus. This is our first rainy weekend of the autumn and what appears to be the definitive end of the dry season (and fire season, too). Here in the central Bay Area, we’ve been on the southern edge of a big, wet storm that blew in from the Pacific. Up north, there are some big totals for the last 24 hours–more than 8 inches in locations in the Sacramento, Feather, and American watersheds. Here, the totals have been more modest: an inch or an inch and a half in locations close to the Bay.

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Fall Classic: ‘The Southpaw’

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“I have seen many a pitcher, but there’s few that throw as beautiful as Pop. He would bring his arm around twice and then lean back on 1 leg with his right leg way up in the air, and he would let that left hand come back until it almost touched the ground behind, and he looked like he was standing on 1 leg and 1 arm and the other 2 was in the air, and then that arm would come around and that other leg would settle down toward the earth, and right in about there there was the least part of a second when his uniform was all tight on him, stretched out tight across his whole body, and then he would let fly, and that little white ball would start on its way down the line toward Tom Swallow, and Pop’s uniform would get all a-rumple again, and just like it was some kind of a magic machine, the split-second when the uniform would rumple up there would be the smack of the ball in Tom’s mitt, and you realized that ball had went 60 feet 6 inches in less than a second, and you knowed that you seen not only Pop but also a mighty and powerful machine, and what he done looked so easy you thought you could do it yourself because he done it so effortless, and it was beautiful and amazing, and it made you proud.”

–Mark Harris, “The Southpaw,” 1953.

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Annals of Berkeley Solid-Waste Management

cart102110.jpgOur block today enters the Fancy-Ass Recycling Cart Era. Last week, the recycling pickup crews came around and picked up the chaff the recycling poachers had left behind, and they also distributed these nice baby blue “split carts” that are apparently 1) supposed to make it harder for the recycling poachers to grab the more lucrative materials and run off with them and 2) designed to make recycling here a more efficient and tasteful enterprise.

As to the first point, it’s obvious that all a determined poacher needs to do is flip up the lid of the container and start digging around in the “cans and bottles” side of the cart to find what they’re looking for. Those who are not content to rummage around like that can also resort to just tipping the cart over and dumping out the contents. That would be aggressive, but these folks are in it for the money, not recreation. In my late walk with The Dog last night, I didn’t see any turned-over carts; but I did come across one person bent over one of the carts, pawing through the contents.

Unknown: How the recycling upgrade will pencil out for the city financially (I’ve found one reference that suggest the price tag for the carts is $2.7 million–31,000 carts at $90 each), which I believe also includes special trucks that can divide the paper/cardboard and metal/glass/plastic components of the recycling stream. It’s also unclear to me whether the city or its recycling contractor will spend more on workers to sort what’s the material the trucks pick up. I’m sure the argument has been made that any extra costs will be at least partially defrayed by additional revenue the city realizes through its increased share of recyling proceeds (the poachers divert a lot of the potential cash now).

Live On-the-Scene Update (10:45 a.m.): Although I resorted to a tried and occasionally effective strategy of not putting the recycling out until after 7 a.m.–that increases the chances the city contractor, the Ecology Center, will pick up the stuff instead of the poachers–a pirate arrived and cleaned just about all of the bottles and cans in the cart. Looked like the same had happened up and down our block. So the next question will be: how much do the new carts actually affect the amount of recycling picked up by the contractor.

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Two Mugs, One Shot

suspect102010.jpgWe were watching KTVU’s “10 O’clock News” tonight–the Bay Area’s erstwhile decent local news broadcast (all right, KTVU: go ahead and look up “erstwhile”; the rest of us will wait here)–when a story came on about Berkeley police announcing they’d solved several recent street robberies. In one case, involving a group who was holding up pedestrians with a shotgun, the cops said they’d picked up four locals. KTVU showed pictures of four young guys. Next, the anchor said the police had announced an arrest in another stickup, and then they put the above two pictures–or one picture–up on the screen. You just hope that this is a picture of a real suspect–for extra points, one of the two in this case–because based on the stupidity of using the same picture twice, you don’t really have any reason to trust they got any of the pictures or names right.

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Helianthus whatchamacallit

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Years ago—ten, maybe—Kate found a container or two of these fall sunflowers at a local drug store or hardware store that was selling seasonal flowers. We planted them. And every September, they burst out for a month or so of glory (unkempt glory, in our case, but that's in keeping with everything else around here).

Question is: What are they? Passers-by and neighbors have sometimes asked. We still have the little plastic stick label that came with the container. It says "Helianthus salvifolius" and continues: "Perennial sunflower with stems up to 4ft. Clusters of yellow-orange ray flowers in summer. Loves sun and warm position."

Fine, but just try to find one at your friendly local nursery. Or Google (or Bing or Yahoo!) "Helianthus salvifolius." Nothing comes back. 

What you do find if you peruse Helianthus are some very, very similar looking species. Take a look at Helianthus angustifolius, also known as swamp sunflower, for instance. Pretty darn close. Or Helianthus salicifolius, or willow-leaf sunflower. Not quite as close–the leaves on the stem really are long and willowy. 

Anyway. It's our minor front-yard botanical mystery. If any plant sleuths come across this, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion. 

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Berkeley Dawn

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Not to be confused with "Delta Dawn." Thursday morning featured an unusual altocumulus filled sky (as opposed to the usual option: entirely socked in with low clouds, or entirely clear). The week's warm days have given way to cool, breezy, mostly cloudy weather.