A List of Things I’m Good At:
- Nothing.
In other news: Mammatus clouds!
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We be gettin’ the Chinook winds, which explains why it’s so freakishly warm today.
Is it December?
JUST A LITTLE BIT OF SNOW:
Holy hell, I stood out at that bus stop for an HOUR this morning. Why? Because right before my bus stop is the super busy intersection of 4th street and 16th avenue. The snow storm had knocked out the power to the lights and so it was being treated like a four-way stop.
During morning rush-hour.
It’s a damn good thing I like to get to campus early, ‘cause if I’d been waiting for the next #19 bus I wouldn’t have made it in time.
I would have just freaking walked to campus, but I don’t know how to walk there yet. It’s not a straight shot and you have to go some weird way to get there.
Edit:
Holy crap, so the snow has pretty much decimated all of Calgary’s trees, or their branches at the very least. There is debris EVERYWHERE. They’re saying it’ll take at least two weeks to clean everything up.
Random iPod things
I guess it’s one of those days where it’s snowing upside down.
LOL LONGEST WALK EVER I’MMA GO EAT A CAKE!
(This is what happens when I just barely start my walk to the bus and my iPod battery bites it ‘cause I hadn’t charged it in forever.)
Yes, I took that picture on the 26th, not on the day I’m talking about it in my blog. Deal with it.
Anyway.
Matt, these shoes reminded me of you, so I thought I should bring them to your attention.
That’s all for today.
Man, look at the air quality today
I missed the “early” bus this morning and was going to walk to campus, but last time I walked in this much smoke my eyes hurt for like three days straight. Since I have to proctor my students taking their exam today, I decided I would kind of prefer to have my eyesight for the morning and just waited for the “late” bus.
But tomorrow is WALKING DAY! I love Fridays for that reason alone. I should go to the fair, too. Anyone want to go to the fair with me?
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Cumulonimbus!
I found the coolest book at Bookmans this evening. It’s called The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and it’s a half-serious, half-hilarious guide to the grey skies above us.
Using altitude as an organization factor, Mr. Pretor-Pinney discusses each cloud type, where they’re found on earth, variations of the main types, and provides awesomely-captioned photos. In what other book would you find the phrase “cloud pornography”? Or the caption, “Just as it is wrong to draw Christmas trees with the branches pointing downwards, it is also wrong to draw raindrops in the shape of tears. Children who insist on doing so should be severely punished”?
If you’re at all interested in the floating puffs of water vapor hovering above us, I’d give this book a read. It’s pretty freaking great. Totally recommend it!
Parking Lot Adventures: Nature Edition!
I got owned by a dust devil this afternoon.
I left work around 1 PM today. Since it’s summer session at PCC and no one ever comes in on Friday anyway, I was lucky enough to park not only in the main lot but also in a nice shady spot under a tree.
So I’m walking across the parking lot and everything’s fine…it’s not windy at all (surprisingly) and even though it’s like 105 degrees, it felt good after sitting under a blasting air conditioner all morning.
I unlock the car and open up the back driver’s side door so I can throw my backpack back there. I’ve got the upper half of my body in the car (I was trying to bury my backpack under a bunch of stuff so my USBs/iPod/phone/etc. weren’t in the direct sun on the drive home) and my butt sticking out of the door.
As I’m screwing around back there I feel this fairly strong gust of wind hit my back. I didn’t want to stand up and mess up my hair in the wind (I’m vain like that), so I just kind of hung out in the back of the car for a second, bent over with my butt still sticking out.
Then this HUGE gust of wind just slams me in the back, KNOCKING ME INTO THE CAR along with a small forest’s equivalent of tree particulate, dust, and sand. The door slams behind me and I look up just in time to see the tail end of a dust devil go spinning wildly past the car. And all is calm once more.
So now the entire back seat of the car, the front passenger seat, the floor in the back, and all the stuff we had on the back seat (cloth grocery bags, my coat, miscellaneous journals and boxes and whatnot) are covered with tree debris. I got a good shot of it down the back of my shirt, too.
Haha, sorry if this blog seems obvious to you (“dust devils involve wind? DO TELL”) but that was my first up-close-and-personal experience with one. I think they look deceptively weak.
Mother nature: 1
Claudia: 0
TWSB: And This is Why I Couldn’t Fly Out To Seattle Today
Lewiston’s under there, somewhere.
These pictures, taken yesterday around 3 PM, show the result of an inversion, or “a deviation from the normal atmospheric property with altitude” (thanks, Wiki). In the case of Lewiston here, the inversion involved temperature: Lewiston was uncharacteristically colder than the surrounding higher elevations (it was 21 degrees in Lewiston, according to my dad’s car, whereas it was about 32/33 in Moscow).
For those readers (like none of you, but whatever) who aren’t familiar with the surrounding geography of Northern Idaho, it’s like this: Moscow and the majority of the surrounding towns sit at about 2,500 feet above sea level. Lewiston, on the other hand, is situated at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers and is thus at about 745 feet above sea level. To get to Lewiston from Moscow you have to drive down the Lewiston Grade, a 10-mile winding spiral of highway that wraps in and out of the surrounding hills and drops you a total of 2,000 vertical feet.
It sounds a lot more fun than it actually is.
Anyway, on any given day Lewiston is usually about 9,000 degrees hotter than Moscow, so to experience below freezing temperatures (and snow! Break out the panicked drivers) down there is weird.
There are several causes of inversions so I don’t know if I picked the right one to explain here, but it seems most likely given the conditions and surrounding geography. An inversion can occur when warmer, less dense air moves over a cooler and denser mass of air. This usually occurs around warm fronts (or areas of oceanic upwelling, but that’s not happening in Lewiston, haha). If the lower dense area is sufficiently humid, then a layer of thick fog can often be found at the inversion cap.
Other consequences of thermal inversions I learned about when researching this on Wiki include:
- Still, murky air
- Mirages
- a green flash (no, not the love child of the Green Lantern and The Flash, sorry)
- the total reflection of sound waves off the cap of the inversion, which causes major problems in the case of explosions.
Cool, huh?
But now I can’t fly out until Monday morning, at best.
Oh, also this:
Master’s degree, bitches!
TWSB: Santa Ana is Coming to Town
I don’t know how closely any of you dudes follow the news, especially weather-related news, but as of right now the Southwest US is being battered by what are known as the Santa Ana winds.
The Santa Ana winds, which arise in Southwest California in late fall or early winter, are the strongest they’ve been in nearly a decade according to CNN. Gusting at 60 MPH in some places, they’ve already knocked out the power to a large portion of people living in Southern California.
According to the Wiki article, the Santa Ana winds arise when the surface air in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert becomes cool and begins to fall to lower elevations. Sinking into the valleys and canyons of the lower desert, the air is often pushed through the land’s channels at near hurricane forces. In addition, its sinking in elevation causes it to heats up again (a process called adiabatic heating; as the air sinks the pressure around it increases, thus causing the air to heat as it is compressed). This, when combined with the fact that the air has already been dried by orographic lift before reaching the Great Basin, makes for extremely dry winds, often with relative humidity levels below 10%, gusting at extremely high forces. These winds push across Southern California and, as evident by the recent news, cause havoc.
Edit: video!
Woohoo, crazy weather!
Rome was actually built in a day and a half.
When I’m not carrying anything and feel like I could run five miles, I get to the bus stop just as the bus is pulling in.
When I have 50 pounds combined of backpack and groceries and it’s windy and cold, I miss the bus by about 30 seconds.
SUCH IS LIFE.
Anyway.
One gripe I’ve had with my iPod Touch is the fact that, unlike the Nano, it doesn’t have a pedometer. I love Nano’s pedometer ‘cause I’m that type of obsessive person who likes to track progress and estimate changes in my daily patterns and just generally be a number watching weirdo.
But today I found probably the coolest “you’re obsessive so you’ll love this” app: iTreadmill. I will utilize this tomorrow on my walk to whatever the hell mall I decide to go to, but I calibrated it this afternoon and can already tell it’s awesome.
It tracks:
- Steps
- Steps per minute
- Time
- Average pace
- Average speed
- Calories
- Distance
It keeps track of your history and gives you graphs! You can create a playlist to listen to as you go (I just put my whole “Favorites” playlist to play), you can enter your weight to get an accurate calories estimate, and you can set step, calories, distance, or time goals and set alarms to sound for certain milestones to your goals if you like that kind of stuff (I do). It also pauses automatically after 5 seconds of inactivity so waiting at stoplights and such won’t lessen your average speed.
HOW COOL IS THAT?
Download it, dudes.
Also, they should just make this a static claim on CTV weather for Vancouver:
Earlier today when they still had Saturday’s prediction up they actually had words (“light rain,” “rain,” “more rain” (seriously), “rain and snow”), but I guess they ran out of synonyms.
SUCH IS LIFE.
Alive Beyond Reason
Well, today was interesting.
1) Snow! Snow makes everyone freak out up here.
2) The bus Twilight Zone. I got on the 8 bus and it went completely not where it was supposed to go. We were all yelling, the driver just kept driving, it was really quite freaky. Then I got on the 10 bus and it did the same freaking thing. What.
3) This afternoon involved a good fifteen minutes of duck-and-cover cautionary behavior due to a psychotic gentleman who had a knife and was hell bent on finding someone and “motherfucking MURDERING” them. Quite frightening indeed. No, this wasn’t on campus.
And now I’m watching Team America: World Police and remembering how hilarious their portrayal of Kim Jong Il was. “Hans Brix! OH NO!”
And puppet sex. So much puppet sex.
Sorry these blogs suck as of late; it’s been a rough start to the year for reasons I’m not going to go into right now.
Okay? Okay.
HOLY LORD IT’S COLD
Today got colder than I thought it ever got in Vancouver. Here’s how my wonderful little night went:
1. Had to buy groceries at Safeway. Stood out in freezing cold (added bonus: wind chill!) still wearing exercise clothes (read: skimpy pants and shirt) and dinky coat waiting for the bus for about 20 minutes.
2. Got home and realized that my heat had, for whatever reason, failed to come on during the day.
3. Also realized that I left the window in the bedroom cracked (I need it opened when I sleep) and that the wind was blowing INTO my apartment, making it even colder than it should have been without the heat off. It was 45 degrees.
4. Curled up in blanket with space heater blasting for about twenty minutes before finding the courage to shower.
5. Surprise! No hot water.
6. Made noodles and tried not to freeze to death.
7. Remembered I had a microwave heating pad from my mom. Life got substantially better.
Today’s song: Everybody (Radio Edit) by Rudenko
Bless the Gods of Academia!
If, that is, there are such gods to be blessed.
Either way, I’m very happy that we got a snow day today. Why, you ask? Statistics homework. I’d done it all, of course, but I felt the need to redo it all again in preparation for the test on Monday.
I’m just that obsessive.
And I spent the whole day listening to disco music. Thank you, iTunes radio.
Good, productive day. Couldn’t ask for more.
Oh wait, except for this:
Theory: Rain Makes People Stupid and Eat Sticks
No joke.
Part One: “Rain Makes People Stupid”
FOR GOD’S SAKE! I didn’t think people could get any dumber on this campus in regards to their walking behaviors, but apparently, they can. So in response to this, I am now laying down a (sarcastic) set of rules for all you people based on my observations today:
1) Being in possession of an umbrella automatically frees you from any rules involving social consideration. Your privileges include being allowed to aimlessly swerve around like a chicken with your head cut off because you fail to realize that you can actually lift your umbrella up slightly so that you can see where you’re going underneath it, carrying oversized umbrellas and not yielding to other walkers on the sidewalk because hell, you’ve got the bigger umbrella, and standing in front of doorways for five minutes as you shake the water off said oversized umbrellas while remaining totally oblivious to the fact that other people would like to pass through said doors.
2) You’re automatically allowed to amble aimlessly and at the speed of 0.000001 miles per hour down the center of sidewalks where doing so does not allow room for people to pass on either side of you because hey—everyone likes to be out in the rain for longer than is necessary, especially when they’re being delayed by a total insensitive idiot.
3) Making such incredibly blatant observations about incredibly glaring issues, such as, “your pants are wet” will be met with such serious and sincere comments such as, “gee, you’re a regular Einstein! I wondered at this sensation of wetness around my ankles and could not put my finger on what was causing it! No no, it takes true genius in the form of an observer pointing out obvious facts to relate such information to the uninformed person to which it is happening! Bravo, good sir! Bravo!”
Freaking people.
Part Two: “…and Eat Sticks”
I go to philosophy today and sit by, as always, some football player who claims to see me specifically at each game (I know I know, football player + philosophy = does not compute, bear with me here). Today, I notice he has his usual cup of overpriced coffee from the coffee shop, but is chewing on what appears to be a stick. I’d say this stick is about five inches long, and about a centimeter in diameter. “Okay,” I think, “he’s gnawing on a stick. A little strange, but I’ll swing with it.”
I swear to god the whole stick was gone by the time the professor finished lecturing.
He freaking ate a stick! I am beside myself. I will never look at football players the same again.
Side point: my philosophy teacher rocks.
Eigenblogger 