Tag: weather

Saved by the gPhone

The last several times I’ve gotten my car washed, it’s always been less than 48 hours before a rainstorm. (Which gives you an idea of how long I tend to put off getting it washed.) And it really needs it again. I’d planned to get it before work last Friday, but didn’t make it, and figured I’d take care of it this morning after dropping alenxa off at work. (Which was an adventure in itself, mainly because neither of us realize how mind-bogglingly bad the 55 south is during morning rush hour.) Then I realized I hadn’t checked the weather forecast this morning.

Well, yesterday I finally talked myself into getting a T-Mobile G1 (I’ve posted my first impressions of the phone at K2R). One of the apps I’d installed pulls data from the Weather Channel. It took me about 15 seconds to discover there was a 70% chance of rain tomorrow.

Saved!

Cool

The theme of the day, at least for me, has been trying to keep cool. I went to see Transformers (and I have some things to say about it at K²R) in part because I was curious, in part because I found a Regal movie pass I’d forgotten, but in part because movie theaters are air conditioned better than our apartment is.

Came back mid-afternoon. Rehydrated. Opened up all the windows since it had gotten to the point where it was just as hot inside as outside, and at least outside had a breeze. Thought about swimming, then thought about just sticking my head under the shower for a minute. Finally settled on swimming, for the first time in several years.

We’ve been in this apartment for something like 6 years, and until today, neither of us had ever used the pool. The last time I swam was on our 2003 trip to Hawaii with the IVC choir (with alenxa of course, and also andrea_wot and zehntaur, though I can’t recall whether either of them were on that side trip), when we stopped at a small bay on the north shore of Oahu. That was salt water, so buoyancy was another issue. (On a related note, every time I walk down the main aisles of the Spectrum, I get stopped by the “Wonders of the Dead Sea” spa people. It’s getting to the point where I want to start responding, “Yes, I have heard of the Dead Sea!” and then rattling off a bunch of facts about it. Then telling them I still don’t want their spa products. Do I look like their target audience?)

Treading water is more tiring than I remember. And I seem to have no natural buoyancy. When I lie on my back, I have to flap my arms and legs from time to time or my face starts sinking below the surface. Still, I was out there for about an hour, trying to keep out of the way of the family teaching their two kids to swim (I think it was the mother and an aunt, with the father sitting out on the deck). When I realized that my eyes were clouding up with chlorine, and my fingers were beginning to look like prunes, I climbed out and walked on unsteady legs back to the apartment, rinsed off, and collapsed for a few minutes.

It’s still warm, but it’s a manageable warmth. Evening should be more comfortable.

Current Music: Aimee Mann, Ghost World
Current Location: home

Smoke

It’s not particularly smoky or even hazy in the Irvine Spectrum area. It does, however, smell like a campfire outside. Just slightly east of north, a huge plume of smoke is rising from the hills, drifting west in a band across the entire northwestern sky.

Last night on the way home we could just barely see the silhouette of those same hills, outlined by a faint orange glow almost invisible against the glare of street lights and traffic signals.

I took some photos at lunch. I’ll try to post them tonight, along with some that alenxa took yesterday morning. Yesterday was really strange, because it started out foggy. The fog had mostly lifted by the time we left for work, but the beginnings of the smoke from the hours-old fire seemed to blend with the remnants of the fog.

Meanwhile, the LA Times has posted some impressive photos of the smoke and, closer up, the efforts to contain the fire.

Edit: Photos are up at K2R.

WTF weather

It’s 82° outside. That, in itself, is not terribly bizarre for SoCal in January. What’s bizarre is the fact that it’s 15 degrees cooler inside.

Around 11:00 this morning I was seriously considering turning on the heater, until I decided to check the temperature outside. It was 65° in the living room and 78° on the balcony. So I opened all the windows I could. The living room has warmed up, but due to our floorplan, the back room with all the computers hasn’t much.

What makes absolutely no sense is the fact that our apartment has lousy insulation. We would never get this effect on a summer day that reached 78° by 11:00 and 82° by 2:00 when we might actually want it. (Although 65° is a bit extreme.)

Fogging Things Up

  1. When I got out of bed, alenxa said, “Hey, there’s fog out there!” A half an hour earlier, when she’d gotten up, it had been clear. By the time we left for work, all that was left was just enough haze to maximize glare and make the broken sun visor and lack of sunglasses a problem. We did get a great view of one of the ex-marine base blimp hangars where the near end was perfectly visible, but it faded into the fog so that the far end was completely hidden. (Naturally, by the time I dug the camera out, the light turned green and we didn’t get a picture.)
  2. There’s something fascinating about the high-tech/low-tech contrast in surgery where the instruments consist of a styrofoam cup and a long Q-tip. OK, the cup has to be full of liquid nitrogen, but it just seems so simple.
  3. Last week I got into work and said to a co-worker, “Is it just me, or do people not know how to drive in the rain?” “I think they just don’t know how to drive.” I spent nearly 10 minutes at a turn signal this morning because some idiot didn’t notice it turned green, and the next car was a big two-piece truck with no acceleration capability whatsoever. And then there was the freeway…
  4. Amazon’s shipping decisions just don’t make any sense. Last week I placed an order for three items (so I could hit that magic $25 and get free shipping). I checked the box to lump everything into as few shipments as possible. So of course they decided to just ship two of them. Then they shipped the third the next day. Yesterday, the second shipment arrived, but I’m still waiting for the first. Edit: The first package arrived today. It seems holiday shipping is already in full swing, because the UPS guy showed up around 7:30.
  5. Server room is freezing. This is good. When it isn’t, my boss says things like “You can smell the electronics trying to die!” And things crash. And we have to spend half the day fixing things that crash.
  6. Speaking of things that crash, I’m getting very annoyed at Microsoft’s decision in MFC 7.0 to stop hiding menus and toolbars in Print Preview mode.

Lunch Lessons Learned

  1. Smoothie-and-sushi, while an excellent combination under summer and fall weather conditions, is less than ideal for a cold, wet day.
  2. Even if you’re convinced that it can’t possibly start raining enough to warrant an umbrella in the next 45 minutes… bring it anyway.
  3. Check the soles of your shoes once in a while so that you discover they no longer have any tread before you find yourself slipping every few steps on a wet sidewalk.
  4. With #3 in mind, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf isn’t particularly close to the food court at the Spectrum. It’s really too bad they kicked out the Diedrich’s instead of, say, moving them into the food court.
  5. Frosty doesn’t know how to pronounce the word chaste. As I got out of the car, they were having a big argument, with listeners IMing in to tell him that Heidi and Frank were pronouncing it correctly and Frosty insisting that he had heard the word more often and therefore knew how it should be pronounced.

I can see clearly now

The sun is shining for the first time in over a week, and the gardeners at our apartment complex are out in force, almost as if they were on call, waiting for a chance for it to be dry enough to work.

It’s always amazing how green the hills are after rains like this, and it always seems unbelievable that they’ll be golden brown again by summer.

Current Music: Guess.

Weekend Thoughts

Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.

Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.

It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.

Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.

What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?

If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.

The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.

Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.