(Typed in yesterday.)
The most interesting part of my trip was the very last part.
It had just started to cool down a notch as I was leaving on Christmas Day. In fact, the forecast that day had the off chance of some wet snow mixed in with the rain. So I had been keeping an eye on the weather back home in case it actually got cold and snowy enough to ice up the runways at PDX (which happens once or twice a decade, and as we've had a long run of mild winters, we're sort of overdue.
Nothing more than a few slushy snowfalls that left paved surfaces wet happened. The temperature at PDX was a safe 33 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. So I wasn't expecting much as I got back home today, maybe a few thin patches of melting slush on the grass at the airport.
The descent was odd: rapid at first, then leveling off for a long time and circling in a holding pattern. A hole appears in the clouds. Obviously we're circling over Eastern Oregon, as there's fields covered with an appreciable amount of snow. Wait! That's a subdivision over there. And a freeway. Is that Tualatin under all that snow? Then the Vancouver waterfront and downtown district appear as the plane heads into final approach. All blanketed in white.
Turns out it had started snowing real hard right after our plane took off. There's a good four to five inches on the parked cars outside, more than I've ever seen since moving here almost three years ago to the day.
It's still snowing lightly as I type this, and the light outside is turning that wonderful bluish color you only get as dusk falls on a snowy day.
Walked to the neighborhood theater and saw The Triplets of Belleville last night. Some movies you just know are going to be great based on the trailers alone. Triplets was one of those movies.
Which will make things real, um, interesting if it eventually gets here. It's managed to make it to Seattle and Olympia, which are if anything less vulnerable to arctic air than Portland (we have the Gorge for it to pour east through). And it has been five or six years, so we're sort of due for it.
Teens and twenties may not sound very cold to someone from Chicago or New York, but such conditions are quite different when they hit cities whose houses often have uninsulated water pipes run through unheated crawlspaces.
The New Year's Day snow is all gone, by the way. It doesn't take much to melt snow when the ground is well above freezing.
I realize the last such storm did dump from 1 to 3 feet of snow over large areas of the lowlands of western Washington (including about two feet at my house in Seattle's north end) in late 1996. And Portland did suffer a horrible ice storm that took weeks to recover from back in the 1970s. But please. Those are the historical worst cases -- usually the results of an arctic front making it east of the Cascades is much less dramatic.
Getting windier and nastier with perhaps a touch of snow or ice is the most likely outcome. Guess it's time to do a public service and plug up all those east-facing foundation vents so the pipes in the crawlspace don't freeze.
Only a flurry or two of snow, though. They're talking about a snow-and-ice storm Monday or Tuesday as a marine weather system displaces the cold air. That would be fun. Haven't seen an ice storm in ages.
That's what it feels like, at least, what with the blustery winds, temperatures in the low 20s, and snow flurries. It's actually the first time in six years or so it's gotten cold enough to freeze the ground and turn evergreens the shade of greenish-black they normally wear through most of the winter in colder climates. About to head out to do some shopping just in case the threatened heavy snow materializes later in the afternoon.
Needless to say, the subtropical plants in the courtyard do not look very happy about that....
I will have to say that as natural disasters go, the Great Snowstorm of 2004 (or something; it's going to be given a name, all the historic storms around here get names) is very beautiful. It's been in the high teens this morning, cold enough to keep the snow wonderfully fluffy and powdery and squeaky-cold. It brings back memories of the big snowstorms in the Rockies I experienced as a teen and young adult.
Took a bunch of pictures of street scenes with Victorian houses and apartment blocks in them. I'll get them developed and scanned later in the week when normal weather returns.
In the fall of 1996, there was an article in the Seattle Times about the great snowfalls of decades past in Seattle, the lack of same in recent years, and how the expanding size of the metro area (and consequently the "urban heat island" effect) meant that it was probably impossible for such snowfalls to happen again.
It started snowing on the day after Christmas. Snowing quite hard, in fact. And kept up at it -- on and off -- for the next three days. Several hours after it had changed back to rain and started melting, I finally thought to stick a yardstick into the snow covering my backyard deck. I forget the exact figure but it was over twenty inches.
Last fall, there was an article in the Oregonian about how much more common snow and severe cold used to be in Portland, the lack of same in recent years, and how the expanding size of the metro area... yadda, yadda, yadda, almost an exact repeat of the logic in the earlier Times article.
And we've now had four measurable snowfalls in the downtown core, a day whose high temperatures tied the old record low, and six inches of snow and two or three inches of sleet today alone. It's still in the low twenties and alternating between sleet and freezing rain out there.
Up until it got dark (absolutely love seeing the lights glow yellow in that ice-blue twilight) it was pleasantly bringing back old memories. Now I'll confess to getting tired of it.
But right now I'll just be pleased if my power stays on through the night. About thirty years ago, Portland suffered a severe ice storm that destroyed much of the electrical infrastructure in the city. Some people went a week or more without power.
Yes, it's the kind of thing that almost never happens here. But "almost never happens" has been happening quite a bit the past few days.
Hopefully, the forecast barrage of freezing rain won't materialize tonight. The one good thing about the thaw being slow in coming is hopefully it will be gradual when it comes. I remember how Seattle's streets turned into rivers and lakes in 1996 when the weather abruptly changed from freezing and snow to the fifties and heavy rain.
Needless to say, the city remains shut down for the second straight day in a row. It feels like a holiday weekend.
Which, in some sense, I suppose it is. As I've written, I'm not much for formalized holidays and rituals; I celebrate nature as it happens. And what's been happening the past few days is so exceptional that it's forced everyone into doing that.
Haven't done a whole lot of that myself since taking lots of pictures Tuesday morning. I've come down with a scratchy throat so I've been mostly staying inside and being lazy.
Feeling cabin fever more than a scratchy throat, and wanting to get one last batch of wintry picture taking in, I decided to take a walk in Washington Park with camera, tripod, and macro lens.
Good timing. The temperature was creeping above the freezing mark, so while there were plenty of winter pictures to take, I was also treated to the sounds of a land starting to free itself from its icy burden. There were the normal dripping sounds, to be sure. As well as some different ones.
Such as the busy symphony of clatter-tinkle-skitter-skitter-skitter noises as fragile icy molds encasing camellia and English laurel leaves break free, fall to the icy crust below, shatter, then slide down the slick surface.
And some wonderful delicate chiming music that takes a a few sentences to explain. Some of the heaver freezing rain showers caused water to pond in depressions in the crusty surface created by previous freezing rain showers. The water eventually seeped through, but not before the surface of the temporary puddles had started to skin over with ice crystals. So the depressions ended up roofed with a delicate lattice of crystals, each of which sounded a different note as it was struck by a raindrop.
Just not writing much here (to state the obvious). And the snow is almost completely gone.
Not that I'm particularly big on the legitimizing concepts of the State these days, but you'd at least expect one claimant to such legitimacy to honor the principle in general. Apparently not:
The commander of U.S.-led coalition forces urged Saddam Hussein's loyalists Friday to lay down arms and "embrace the future" in a sovereign Iraq, saying they will otherwise end up either dead or in custody.No, I'm not making this up. They're literally claiming that sovereignty is all about submitting to the will of an occupier. Full text here in case you want to read the whole thing.
Then again, this is the same ruling class which claims socialized medicine is bad because "you won't be able to choose your own doctor", in spite of the fact that it's the capitalist American HMO's who deprive people of that right and that the socialized systems of Canada and Western Europe all do allow patients that liberty.
Recently, the alternate reality I've been musing on is what if at least a few kids in my high school had been listening to CRASS instead of the gawdawful late-'70s disco and arena rock that predominated. (I still don't particularly like disco. It's why I can't the concept that as a queer man disco is "our music".)
Would the intriguing lyrics and unconventional use of audio sampling trumped what was then my strong aversion to anything loud, brash, and modern? What trouble could I have gotten into had the little spark of an "Aha!" that nuclear deterrence is a myth been flamed into a fire of desire for a saner world?
It's sort of a hypothetical reality, I guess. It would have been remarkable for the kids in a town that's firmly part of the nuclear weapons complex (yes, it's that Los Alamos) to be listening to an anarchist punk band that screams out against militarism and mutually insured destruction. (And were their albums even distributed in the USA back then?)
As it was, that spark fizzled. Which had its own benefits, as it led me to gradually be dragged kicking and screaming to anarchism over a number of years. I know most of the shibboleths of the other sides because I've held most of them myself over the years, which gives me ample verbal ammunition in discussions.
When, that is, my ego doesn't get into the way. Talking live and face-to-face, I can only be coherent and convincing if I give up on any attempt to be coherent and convincing -- the times I can really deliver the clinchers are the times I realize only after what I'm done what kind of discussion I just had.
And, yes, the myth of US-Soviet nuclear deterrence was just that: a myth. Nuclear bombs didn't deter war, they merely motivated the outsourcing of it to the poor peoples of the world, as proxy wars replaced direct wars.
Finally, if you think you know what punk rock is and therefore you haven't bothered listening to any of it, head over here and do some listening. You just might be surprised.
Now comes the time to regret my stupidity in choosing the default shipper (UPS). Their tracking page shows it has arrived in Portland, which if past experience holds true means it'll be another five to ten days before it finally gets delivered (three days my a**).
The standard "apartment entry systems for dummies" notice is already posted on the front door.
Speaking of rich person's toys, my digital camera arrived. Apparently in one piece despite the box giving all appearances of having been drop-kicked. Maybe the unusually fast (by Portland UPS standards) delivery was their way of compensating me for that.
Anyhow, it appears to work fine. Though it sure is different from film photography. I do like the ability to take close-ups coupled with the small size. I don't particularly like the huge welter of features and menus. I'm very happy it can be manually focused (which actually seems to work less clumsily than I had imagined), and that the "artificially intelligent" autofocus can be dumbed down to a regular autofocus.
Which isn't a surprise given that native maple and alder trees evolved in an environment free of ivy and the consequent extra wind and ice loading it imposes.
The Japanese witch hazel in Washington Park has been blooming nicely.
That picture was taken two days ago. Today it was raining too hard for me to risk getting my new digital camera wet. I did attempt a shot of some interesting wet tree bark, but in between hurrying so the camera didn't get too wet and the slow shutter speed and wide aperture necessitated by the gloomy conditions, I never got a very sharp picture. And the rain proceeded to intensify thereafter.
The rain. I had been walking in it for a while before realizing I was taking it for granted. Then I remembered how glad I was to escape the desert and be somewhere green and living when I first moved to Seattle, and how much I enjoyed my walks in the plentiful rainy weather when I first moved there.
I could still be there, you know. Walking in the blowing dust with sand in my eyes and my allergies on a rampage, hardly a green thing in sight. Or living in a deep-freeze with piles of dirty snow that last for months.
That last part of my walk was a lot more special than the first.
All the rainy weather has (as usual) been making the mosses and lichens happy. It paused long enough this afternoon for me to snap a few pictures of a car a friend is trying to sell.
On the computer front, yet another E-mail virus is making the rounds and clogging up one of my inboxes. (Since I don't run Windoze, the virus itself can't harm me, but all those infected e-mails clog my inbox and bog down one of my mail servers.) Naturally, it exploits Microsoft's idiot software and its idea of "opening attachments" (you "open" an .EXE file by executing it). It's bad enough that Microsoft is a monopoly that shoves poorly-designed pieces of crap onto the market. What's worse is when even those of us who don't run their crap are made to suffer.
Otherwise you might suffer the embarrassment of publishing a book with a whopper of a spelling error on the front cover. Yes, this book actually exists. Someone else pointed it out to me a few weeks ago at the bookstore where I volunteer.
The most telling example of a prominent typo was on the title page of a technical manual for an operating system I had the misfortune of writing applications for. It gave me a sinking feeling about the quality of the environment I was undertaking to write code for. Experience proved my suspicions to be all too correct: the system had multiple stupid programming errors in the kernel code, errors of the sort you might expect a CS sophomore to make on his or her class programming assignments.
Sometimes you can judge a book (or in this case, an operating system) by its covers.
I forgot once again to discuss with anyone how the recent solstice party and circle underscored once again my differences with Pagans and Wiccans....I don't feel that sense of regret anymore, mainly because I have attempted to explain such differences with Pagans and Wiccans and such attempts usually end with an offended, hurt, or upset Pagan or Wiccan. It's not that I try to achieve such an outcome, only that it always seems to happen nonetheless.
There's sort of a corresponding damage the other way: just like my attempts to explain myself cause trouble for most Pagans, participating in Pagan rituals and practices ends up causing trouble for me, interfering with my own route to spirit. So it's probably best I didn't broach the subject that New Year's Day; nothing positive would have come from it.
What brought this thought up was a discussion on forming a faerie intentional community last evening. One member, a Pagan who places great importance on creating rituals, offered his opinion as to how group participation in ritual was a good way to build community. My response was that I found organized spiritual ritual to be silly and meaningless and wanted no part of being compelled or expected to participate in it. The very idea that anyone would find his rituals silly was more than a little upsetting to the person who first brought the suggestion up.
My next such attempts to explain myself to a Pagan are going to start with a disclaimer or warning as to how such attempts usually prove upsetting to the other party (and now that you know that do you want me to continue?).
Monthly Index for 2004 |
Index of Years