Fighting for the Right to Study

Slumber party at Shields Library! Students have occupied the library in protest of cuts that will reduce services. In a very different approach to last fall’s protest in Mrak Hall, this one comes with the full support of the Chancellor and Provost. Library staff have volunteered to work at the library to provide minimal assistance. I wonder if there will be midnight cocoa runs, ghost stories, and strange dreams…

Weather Hound

You know you’ve become a serious weather hound when of the eight bookmarks in your browser toolbar, seven are weather-related. This phase of mine follows on to my aviation tack of the past month or two, meteorology being the first cousin to travel through the air.

We’re getting a nice little storm right now — the rain starting this afternoon and expecting to last until the middle of Saturday. California weather seems pretty simple though; just watch those cyclonic systems come in eastward from the Pacific. I am much more mystified by the weather elsewhere in the country though. My officemate is heading on a big trip to Africa tomorrow, and was quite dismayed to learn that a major snowstorm is on its way to hit Washington D.C. tomorrow, through where he was scheduled to fly. (The flight has already been cancelled; he was working on rerouting the trip as I left this evening). Where did that storm come from? Why is it expected to be an epic one?

Time to get back to the meteorology texts. It’s not so easy though; there’s a dearth of textbooks on what actually goes into making weather forecasts (there are plenty of texts on physical theory, not so many on the actual practice). I’m nosing out some resources, though.

The Year 1282 in Computer Time

“Can I borrow Hermione?”[the ibook]
“Sure.”
…
“Are you done?”
“Not yet. Do you want to borrow this”
[A look of horror at the black thing running Ubuntu]
…
“Okay. Why doesn’t it work?”
“The concept of a three-button mouse is anathema to mac users, I know.”
“Why is it so slow?”
“This is why we need broadband.”
“Microsoft, begone.”
“Apple, begone.” Grrr.

Crows Overhead, Skies Are Gray

Today was the second annual UC Davis winter bird count; we did a sector of campus centered around the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works. The best birds were a bufflehead and a sharp-shinned hawk: Pica has a full list on Bird By Bird. It was overcast all morning with occasional sprinkles.

It’s been a good week for weather-watching, with a nice series of storms hitting California. We’ve logged 4.35 inches of rain here since Monday. I’m glad I bought a new pair of rain pants last weekend. I’ve been reading up on my meteorology, and found a great educational website yesterday for learning all about operational forecasting. This is the MetEd site (Meteorology Education and Training) site which is run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. I spent several hours today working through their educational module on Skew-T diagrams, which are the graphs made to illustrate the data collected from weather balloon soundings.

Joyce While Spinning

I’ve started listening to Ulysses while working on some hand-dyed (not by me) merino wool. I’m planning fingering/sock weight. It’s beautiful at least in singles, we’ll see what it looks like plied.

I couldn’t get the second CD to work for some reason and am a thwarted Joycean. Loving the language, the exuberance.

It’s still raining.

River Otters In The Arb

We’re expecting three weeks or so of solid rain so we decided to go for a walk this morning out to the UC Davis Arboretum before the deluge hit. We saw a few new birds for the year (green heron, orange-crowned warbler…) but the big excitement was seeing a couple of river otters in the Arboretum waterway! Pica had heard that they were around several weeks ago but received no subsequent news about them. The waterway is a closed body of water so the mystery is how did they disperse into it — probably taking a sneaky path from Putah Creek following any number of culverts. We saw the otters working their way along the north side of the waterway: they were mostly underwater but we could spot their wake and air bubbles. The best view was after they had ducked into one of the storm culverts on the side of the waterway. One of them poked their head forward, and we had a clear view of his muzzle and whiskers! There is plenty of carp for them to eat, so we hope they stick around.

Day Three and Counting

On Tuesday I was making a mid-day run to the Coop. I don’t really listen to NPR except when I’m in the car. It’s a random thing, really.

This week’s random thing was a woman called Michelle Singletary whose idea is to undertake a 21-day financial fast. No plastic, no credit cards, no debit cards. Cash only, and that to be spent only on essentials: food and meds.

I’m not sure if spending $435 at the vet’s counts, but I haven’t done more than whip out $7 for some aspirins for a coworker today that was promptly reimbursed. Lots of cooking at home. Watch out, I might even bake bread.

After 21 days the task is to keep a financial journal for 30….

ETA: the first big test: wanting to donate more than the amount I already have for earthquake relief in Haiti by buying a knitting pattern. Non-knitters, you’d be blown away by how much cash is being raised by the knitting community, particularly Tricoteuses Sans Frontières… well over $57,000 in 72 hours.

Geese Flying IFR

We had rain today, both a shower in the early morning and another in the afternoon. This is a change in weather pattern from this past week, where we’ve had dense and low fog (tule fogs) in the morning lifting to about 1000 feet by midday. The wetlands of the Sacramento Valley have lots of water by now, and frequently I will hear the calls of geese flying above well in the fog. As a pilot would put it, they are flying under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) conditions. It’s easy to imagine that they are calling frequently so as to stay in touch with other members of their flock, but how are they managing to navigate? How do they know when to set down in their favorite flooded field? It’s a mystery. To me that is, but not to the geese.

Not Reading for the Plot

I’ve discovered the e-audiobook service at the Sacramento Public Library, and now I’m knitting away while someone reads me a book. It’s wonderful. I’m gobbling up big books I’ve read before and bigger ones I haven’t.

I’ve always managed to miss Edith Wharton. I saw the film version of the Age of Innocence when it first came out but it seemed a Merchant Ivory period piece, pretty and insubstantial. What I’m astonished by in the book is how perfectly she nails American (specifically, New York postbellum but easily transposable to a Boston I knew when I lived there in the 1990s) snobbery. This might get dull after a few hundred pages but it unfolds in such perfumed, stifling, dark-panelled and rose-bedecked prose that I find myself pulling at my neckline, trying to get more air.

I will never again say that irony is not one of the weapons in the American writing arsenal. Wharton deploys it like a stiletto, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and bearing at its tip an orchid poison. I’m following along in horrid fascination.

For anyone still reading this blog, any recommendations for other books, given how much I’m enjoying this?

Virtual Airsickness

We spent New Year’s Eve lying nauseous in bed — this was following a dinner of pasta with a squash and arrugula sauce and some holiday champagne. Our leading theory is was the perhaps undercooked arrugula that laid us low. (Happily we are feeling much better this New Year’s Day).

Or maybe it was virtual airsickness. Not long after getting this new laptop, I installed the open source flight simulator FlightGear and have been addictively learning to pilot its simulated Cessna 172P since. Right now my game is going on an airport-hopping trip of short flights, having left University Airport in Davis a couple miles from our house a few days ago. Last night’s segment, made just after dinner, was flying from Arcata to Crescent City along the northwest coast of California, with Pica virtually riding along in the co-pilot’s seat.

To make things more interesting, I fly with the real weather conditions fetched from the Internet. Last night’s conditions were the diciest I’ve been in yet. There was a 25 to 35 knot wind aloft from the south-southwest with a good bit of turbulence. I worried about how I was going to land the plane just as my real-life nausea was kicking in. Fortunately the landing wasn’t as tricky as I feared. Below the clouds at 1500 feet the air was smoother. I flew past the airport as far as the Smith River, and then made a 180-degree turn so as to land into the wind. Thanks to the crossed pair of runways at Crescent City, I was able to land with pretty much a straight headwind (I’m not sure I’m up for landing in a 25-knot crosswind).

The wind conditions are pretty similar up there right now. I think I’ll wait before going on my next leg up to Coos Bay in Oregon.