Tag: berkeley

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December

Codorniceswest

Remembering Christmas, a poet said: “December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers.” The snow was like a living thing: “It came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss. …”

That was Wales. And this is California. December on the weather side of the East Bay hills may produce the odd sunny day. I’m not complaining that we don’t have more. But mostly, it’s gray, as gray as the sopping thick felted clouds stretching overhead from the hills a mile to the east all the way past Hawaii to the tropics. No sunset, no moonrise, no stars. Just the same blanket of heavy, sodden gray pressing down day after day.

At least it’s warm.

(Pictured above: Codornices Creek, where it exits the city storm drains for the Bay, during a heavy rain on Thursday; most of the year, the channel is just a trickle. Beyond the reclaimed soccer field on the right is a big new Target store, and beyond that is the interchange for Interstates 80 and 580.)

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We’ve Got Lights

Lights05

Thom and I put up our outside lights this afternoon. The process featured a tangled extension cord — Thom undid it, using mysterious skills he learned in the Sea Scouts — and my mostly silent concern that in my 50-plus clumsiness gravity would get the better of me, I’d pitch off the roof and wind up as a 1-column, 2-inch item in a local daily as a seasonal casualty. I’m still here, and noting the concern, so the worst didn’t come to pass. In fact, it only took us about half an hour to hang the strings, and everything was lit up by dusk.

Now we’re set till that day after the first of the year when the ladder comes out and I go back aloft to take the lights down.

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Near the End of the Ride

November26

The natural destinations for cyclists in Berkeley often involve riding up into or crossing the hills that rise behind the city to the east. I went out for a kind of standard short ride late this afternoon: Up the west face of the hills on a gentle ascent (though not so gentle in my current state of fitness) called Spruce Street, through Tilden Park, a big regional open space that covers most of the top of the hills, then down to San Pablo Dam Road, which runs along the eastern base of the hills. It’s about nine and a half miles each way, and each way features a climb of seven hundred to eight hundred feet, a rolling section, then a long fast descent. Riding back into Berkeley, I came down into town on Euclid Avenue; near the top of the street, there’s a vacant lot — maybe it’s a park, though I haven’t seen any signs — with a clear view out to the west. Riding down Euclid near sunset, I often see people who have driven or walked or cycled to the spot to take in the vista. Tonight was the same. The weather has taken a cool turn (not to say cold, out of respect for those who live in places where it really does get cold), so people out in the twilight were kind of bundled up. The view here is across the bay to Mount Tamalpais. I’ll never get tired of seeing our mountains and ridges against the sky, especially against the evening sky.

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Spidermania

Spider

Two classes of beings frequenting our neighborhood in atypical numbers these days: Mormon missionaries and spiders. The Mormons are less interesting to look at, but they do leave postcards offering to explain the meaning of life. The spiders don’t have much to say on existential and spiritual matters — unless you buy into “Charlotte’s Web,” which I doubt is a true story — but they’re endlessly fascinating to watch if you’re not likely prey. We’ve got at least three big ones that have spun webs outside the house; this one’s next to the front porch (click for full-size image).

[Further research — for instance here and here and here and here — suggests our arachnid visitors are variously called pumpkin spiders, garden spiders and cross orb weavers, aka Araneus diadematus. They’re orb weavers, their venom is of low toxicity to humans, and they’re found throughout Western Europe and North America.]

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Sunset, November 13

Sunset in a neighbor’s window. It was beautiful out here today. Probably close to 70. Clear and dry and except for the short daylight, no clue what time of year it might be, except a nice one. Thanks to the fact the 49ers were playing the Bears today in Chicago, I got to see the contrast with back-there weather. In the first quarter, the temperature was 49 and falling, and it was blowing so hard (gusting over 50 mph, I think)  it seemed hard for the players to predict what would happen to the ball from second to second as it sailed through the air. The wind turned a game between two pretty bad teams into a decent entertainment. Important from the native Chicagoan’s point of view: The Bears won.

Sunset

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Empty Nest Report

Kate and I have just finished Week One of our Empty Nest era. Kate said today that sometimes when she hears the front door open and close here, she finds herself thinking it might be Thom. The other day, when it got to be 4 o’clock, she had the impulse to call home from school and check in with him.

Me, every once in a while — just looking at Thom’s car or his room or sometimes out of nowhere at all — I’ll have a sudden "he’s not here" moment that fits right in with other times I’ve really missed people; it’s like a blow to the solar plexus that comes with no real weight behind it; I can feel my breath catch for an instant, just enough to get my attention and register the sensation. Then it’s back to picking up my underwear or taking out the coffee grounds to the compost.

So. That’s our first week. We talked to Thom tonight. What was his take?

Beyond details like classes (there’s a heavy emphasis on grammar, of all things, in his Journalism 101 class), how he managed his meal-plan points for the first week (he bought a pack of Nutter Butters at one point because "every once in a while, you just need to have some peanut buttery goodness"), and the fact the floor he’s living on is fairly tolerant of a wide selection of musical tastes and volumes, he offered this summary:  "I’m making a bomb-ass transition to college." (For the uninitiated, that is a good thing.)

So: a little perspective on our parental drama. (And, I can’t help thinking: Man, am I glad I’m keeping track of what my kid’s doing in Oregon, as opposed, say, to al Anbar Province).

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Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.

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The Boalt Bagel

Boaltbagel

The end of another week in my illustrious law school career — well, in my career as a law school staff member — and time for another Boalt oddment. I noticed when I walked into the building for a job interview in May that the "C" in one of the "school of law" signs looked improvised; in fact, it looked like it was improvised with a quartered bagel. And so it was, and is.

The mystery here is how long this particular bagel has been doing sign duty; a while, I guess, because another staff member talked about it as one of Boalt Hall’s well-known quirks. I wonder if it ever needs to be replaced. Or whether Boalt’s archivist will ever claim the bagel piece for his collection.

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Solstice Ride

The summer solstice occurred at 11:46 p.m. last night, the 20th. I didn’t go out and fire off my handgun, because I forgot to buy one and I don’t have any ammo.

So today: The first full day of summer. The days are just about as long as they’re going to get. I spent the day in my office at the law school, and didn’t think much about the season. But when I got home, I decided to try to fight past my usual evening inertia and go out for a ride.

I didn’t get started till nearly 8 (7:54, actually), but figured I had enough time to make it to the highest point of Grizzly Peak Boulevard in the Berkeley Hills to see the sun go down (according to the online and newspaper almanacs I’ve found, sunset was at 8:35 p.m.).

I made it up to the little pullout where people go to look down on the city and watch the evening come on when the weather’s clear (there are plenty of evenings when the fog cuts visibility to 100 feet or less up in the hills, and I’ve been riding up there then, too). I made it without about three minutes to spare and watched the sun disappear behind a mountain peak somewhere in northwestern Marin County. Then I got on my bike and started to ride away when someone said, “Dan!”

It was my neighbor Piero, with his son Niko. We’d been standing about 10 yards apart, I’d guess. But all of us were so focused on watching this first day of summer close that we never saw each other. They drove back down, and I finished my ride.

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Raining Monkey Wrenches

Radar

Nature’s mid-June turn toward winter continues, prompting a local news anchor to say, "This rain has certainly put a monkey wrench on a lot of special events." I wouldn’t dare try to improve on that.

But by my completely unofficial calculations, the two mild storms that have blown in from the Pacific over the past week may have been enough for Berkeley to break its record from June rainfall. Old record, 1.21 inches, in 1967; total this month: something more than that — a weather station up at the Lawrence Hall of Science, at a higher altitude than the official weather station on the UC campus, says it’s gotten 1.28 inches so far.

In related news: Tom’s last real day of high school was today. The graduation is tomorrow evening. Outdoors at the Hearst Greek Theatre on campus. Beware the meteorological monkey wrench. Kate and I met the Berkeley High principal at the grocery story the other night — sometimes this is a small town — and he said, "Hope it doesn’t rain. But if it does — well, we’ll do it anyway. There’s nowhere else to go."