November 29, wee hours, Chicago and Oakland. It’s colder here. By 17 degrees. But talk to me again in a couple days. (Oregon location added for family and scholarly interest.)
Heat, a Re-examination
The last day of July, the first of August, it’s supposed to be hot. Today, it’s an unremarkable 90 or so here in Brooklyn. I’m sitting in my brother and sister-in-law’s unairconditioned kitchen about a mile south and east of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not suffering. But tomorrow we’ll be getting what folks to the west have been dealing with for the last couple of days (112 in Bismarck?!). The National Weather Service is warning it will get up to about 100 Tuesday and Wednesday, that it will be plenty humid, and that we’ll have high ozone levels as the air in the region stagnates. (Add rum and guns, then stir for a swell party!)
The last few days, Kate and I have been staying in a friend’s house near the northern New Jersey shore. It’s got central air conditioning, and the system has been running ever since we arrived there last Thursday. It struck me this morning as I walked outside for the first time and shut the sliding glass door behind me that around here, the ability to cool the air in homes and cars and public places of all kinds is just as vital as the ability to heat it in the winter. In the suburbs, anyway, you don’t see homes open to the elements on a hot day any more than you’d see a place with its windows flung open when it’s zero outside. Yet, the weather’s the weather. It may be incrementally hotter on average than it was a generation or two or three ago, but everyone here endured long, stifling stretches of heat then without refrigerating every living space, just as most of the world’s people do today. (We went to France in August 2003 at the tail end of the country’s extended heat wave; I knew air conditioning was uncommon there, but I hoped against hope that somehow our little hotel would be an exception; instead, when we got to our room, we found that the windows hadn’t been opened for days and the place was like an oven — and what was worse was that for several days afterward, there wasn’t enough of a breeze to cool anything off.)
I’m not arguing for some kind of sweaty, hair-shirt virtue in living without air conditioning. Just makes me wonder sometimes what would happen if we all suddenly had to do without (which ties into my fear for the next couple of days; I’m concerned that the power demand here will cause a blackout and shut down the air-traffic-control system and keep us from flying back Wednesday to our effete little climate back in Berkeley). I do remember that before we had our first air conditioners, in 1966, the remedy for hot nights was staying up late watching movies with our mom and taking cool showers before we headed off to bed. Somehow, we slept.
(Picture: Hamilton Avenue and West 9th Street, Brooklyn. It wasn’t really 99 degrees.)
Enough Already
I admit it: At some point, you just want to say, “Basta!” Today makes it 28 or 29 days out of the last 35 that we’ve had measurable rain. Everything’s sodden, and the curbs along every street have turned into permanent streams. But people adapt, like the guy on the bike. Spotted him while walking to work this morning and barely managed to get a shot.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, rain, san francisco, weather
Rain
It’s raining again this afternoon. Off the top of my head, the last day it didn’t rain here was Christmas Eve. It rained every day for a week before that. Up till then, we’d been having a dry December; a dry fall, for that matter. It’s not unusual during our Decembers, Januarys and Februarys to get 10 or 11 or 12 or 14 wet days in a row. What seems a little unusual about the current one is how much rain we’ve gotten. As carefully but unofficially extracted from the UC Berkeley weather station data:
December 17: .41 inches
December 18: 2.33 [Berkeley Flood Terror]
December 19: .18
December 20: .15
December 21: .69
December 22: .81
December 23: .01
December 24 [Ark comes to rest, rainbow and dove appear, etc.]
December 25: .74
December 26: .35
December 27: .23
December 28: .61
December 29: .01
December 30: .94
December 31: 1.51
January 1: .47
January 2: .55
That’s a total of 10.07 inches in the last 17 days (not exceptional during the current storm cycle; my friend Pete told me about one location on the ridge to the west of the Napa Valley that may have gotten 30 inches for the month of December). The total today, Day 18, is .07. So far. The forecast for tomorrow. Dry.
December
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.)
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.
