andamu

[ flora ]
I wish I knew more about plants. Or more specifically, I wish I knew the names of more plants (shrubs, flowers, trees). I wish there were a website where you could go and start looking by leaf shape: rounds, ovals, pear, serrated, thin, holey, then you could delve down deeper by category until you find the thing you are looking for.
Not that I am particularly interested in botany per se, but it would be nice to call the things I photograph by their name, rather than "the small tree with the red fruit vaguely reminiscent of lychees."
Maybe such a site exists, and I am just searching for the wrong thing.
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[ searching ]
I love search engines. I used to drive AltaVista like an old Cadillac - huge, and you have to keep watching the corners, but it rides like a boat. Took me a while to be convinced of Google, perhaps just because I was so tied to AltaVista before. When I took the jump however, I took it with both feet!
If you can adequately describe that for which you are searching, you can get great results. I'm normally pretty good at this - not world-class or anything, but I find what I want within the first five pages usually. Sometimes it takes two or three tries, but I still call that pretty good.

But sometimes I just can't get anywhere with a search. I have found that this is mostly the case where the topic has a specific nomenclature around it.
Take yesterday - I was looking for the official reference of all the java classes and packages, with the definitions, inputs and outputs. Took me more than half an hour of fruitless searching. I finally went back to my old university website, because I know the Java courses there had a link to it. "Class Index!" Well, I did know that it was called that, but for a little bit yesterday the phrase slipped my mind. And no matter how much I tried to search around it, I just couldn't get it. With the phrase, I found what I needed immediately.
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[ Autumn ]
Leaves are turning everywhere now, and we have passed the equinox. Since the "actual" date of equinox depends on the geographic location, our days are still about ten minutes longer than our nights, but not for long. Soon I will be driving to work before sunrise. After the clocks are set back, I would be driving home after sunset. And at some stage, both!
It does make for wonderful views with the steeply slanting rays of the sun very early or very late - perfect for setting off the Fall colors.
The rain has cleared away and we're back up in the high 70s, sometimes even going beyond 80. It is almost as if the weather is playing optometrist with us, putting on her red and copper and golden coat, showing us the wintry rain and temperatures, and then summer shine and warmth, saying, "Which is better: this or that? Look again, this one, or that one?"

[ fog ]
Mornings have been foggy here lately. Not particularly dense, and there's enough visibility to get safely to work, but beautiful. Part of the fascination is that it is strange; I don't recall ever seeing fog in my hometown while growing up.
The first time I consciously remember fog was in Estcourt, Natal, while we were driving to the coast for our annual seaside vacation. We usually left at 3 a.m. to make the long drive, and would hit Estcourt around dawn.
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[ beauty ]
I hate driving in dense fog. I've had to do it a few times and still get rattled when I think about it, and besides, you don't get to see anything.
The lighter fog, the one where you can still see to the end of the street, is the type that enchants me. It seems to turn the entire landscape into layers printed on gauzy chiffon, built up into visible forms in front, and evermore ghostly apparitions toward the back. It brings a new perspective on and new appreciation of the surrounding landscape.
I suppose it is the proximity of the river and the cooler mornings that combine to create my magical morning mysteryland. It is yet another reason I love living here: It is wonderful to have beauty and change and a few surprises all around you.
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Hmmmph! I must be getting old. I thought to throw in an Oscar Wilde quotation, but wanted to get it right, so first I searched the web and then went to dig out my Ellman biography of Wilde.
I thought I recalled his message on the importance of beauty to everyday life as something along the lines of "there is nothing as precious/beautiful in the world as my blue lilies."
Turns out the actual quote is "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china," referring to his two large S�vres lily vases.
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Love Oscar Wilde. Dorothy Parker quipped (and I am no doubt making minor mistakes in the quoting):

"If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram
I never seek to take the credit
We all assume that Oscar said it."

[ EGBDF ]
Mnemonics are frequently used to teach kids (and adults, I suppose) various aspects of music theory. EGBDF are the notes on the lines in the treble clef in the music stave. The rhyme in Afrikaans had something to do with dew drops glistening on every green leaf.
I can't remember exactly how it goes, and the F at the end does not seem to fit, and it doesn't help that the incomplete and incorrect thing has been running over and over in my head the entire day. The picture tells you why.
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I was chauffeured to work this morning. Normally I take the van to work since I am closer, and Nini takes the (more fuel economical) car to college. Today my precious one had a check up with the interventional radiologist who performed his procedure, so he needed a vehicle. Which is why I could rubberneck and click the camera to heart's content from the passenger seat.
There were not a lot of clouds about, which meant that the sun tinted the fog to the East a glowing red and pink. Just a little visual variation in case we were getting blase with the morning scenery layered in the misty veils.

::
Since I already had the camera out, I just ducked inside the lab to drop my bags and grab a cardigan before heading back out into the parking lot to capture more of the amazing morning. As I wandered compulsively snapping around the parking lot, I almost literally stumbled across a section of weeds and wild flowers. They were heavily bedewed, and I was getting really annoyed with the chain link fences ruining my foggy shots.
So, I squatted down at the side of the road despite my creaky, complaining knees and attempted to get in close. I have no idea what the guys driving past me must have thought when confronted by the low moving hump looming through the mist, resolving into the sight of a woman crouching among the weeds by the side of the road outside the lab.
The macros themselves we'll save for another day.
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Oh, I almost forgot. The check up went well - the doctor was happy with mpo's progress. Pain has gone, movement is much improved, and generally he feels far better than before. It must be a great feeling for that doctor to see the direct improvement he had on the quality of life of someone else. And what a great difference it has meant for us.

When I first came to the U.S. we lived in Fargo, North Dakota.
It seems everyone had seen the movie (except me - I've still only seen snippets) so they affect what they believe to be the accent and the expressions. It is a let down when they discover that first, the movie used caricature to some extent, (as all movies do, but especially those dealing with "foreign" subjects) and second, that the movie was not filmed in Fargo. In fact, the majority of it was not even shot in North Dakota, but in Minnesota.

Next we lived for a brief period in San Jose, California. In the heart of Silicon Valley right at the end of the boom and when the bubble burst. The area was almost like South Africa - no clearly defined seasons really, except that in winter it was a little colder and a little duller, less green than in summer.

Urbana, Illinois took us back to the midwest, with very definite seasons, each time of year clearly defined with storybook attributes. Hot and humid green summers, flamboyant flames of color on the autumn trees, drifts of snow and crisp clear skies in winter, and riots of blossoms and bright green shoots in spring. Of course, nobody outside of academia knew where it was, stuck in the middle of farmlands with the majority of the area's population connected in some way to the University.

Now, I live in a state where I have to add "State" to the name to avoid confusion; even so, when people hear I am in Washington state, they frequently start talking about DC. I think they stop listening after they catch something they think they know.
Then to really confuse the issue, I live in a town with a much more famous (and bigger) namesake, Vancouver. People who've known us for years, and to whom we have clearly explained the difference, still sometimes ask questions that reveal they think we live in Canada.
No, we live in Vancouver, Washington, that's Vancouver USA. And that's Washington state, not D.C. We're 300 miles south of the one, and 2,800 miles (mainly) west of the other.

But then again, who cares. Unless of course you are actually planning to visit us. In which case, let me draw you a map :-)

A beautiful morning with sunshine and only a few patches of fog. The light glistened off the frosted edges of the vegetation, so after dropping my bags inside the lab and retrieving my camera and pass, zipping up my jacket and snugging on my gloves, I ventured back out into the "brisk" morning.

So instead of my usual deluge of words, here is a deluge of images.

Now I feel quite heady.

This blog coming to you from Seattle.

Yes, we're showing a colleague from abroad around Seattle this weekend.
We left home around seven yesterday (Saturday) morning, and made a detour at Kelso/Longview to stop at the viewpoint there to look at the bridge and the Columbia.

Given the unseasonably sunny weather we took the ferry to Bainbridge island and back, Finding the $5.40 roundtrip fare far more reasonable than that of the harbor cruises, and without the annoying booming commentary where you're overwhelmed by the sound but unable to hear the actual words, except for some of the particularly inane jokes.

After the steep Pike Hill Climb, stopping only for her to get some souvenir t-shirts, we wandered around the Pike Place Public Market for a while, but unfortunately did not witness a flying fish display. We met some friends for dinner in the University district before returning, chilly and exhausted, to the hotel. Today we have another full schedule planned, culminating in the drive back home tonight.

Continuing the show and tell theme:

Pike Place Market is a delight for browser; this time the flowers caught my eye. As always there were marvelous dried bouquets, but the joy lay in seeing the announcement of spring implicit in the fresh flowers on sale.

Walking back to our vehicle on Saturday at sunset I was amazed by the sight of this series of sculptures perched on the steps in the distance. I have been unable to find out more about them and at the time we were far too tired to go closer and investigate. The Waterfront Fountain was arresting in the golden rays of the setting sun, and equally impressive the next day on our visit to aquarium.

Walking down a sloping corridor with subdued lighting we enter a dome under Puget Sound, looking up at the fish swimming above. The otters were the star attraction in the mammals area, this pair casually floating on their backs.

The "flowers" of the ocean are as colorful and interesting as their air-dwelling counterparts; perhaps even more so since many of them are animate to some degree. I don't know enough about the subject to draw the line between plants and animals, although these seem to be neither. Of course there are some represented here that are clearly animals, although they are mostly stationery.

The fascinating glass art of Dale Chihuly is on display in the aquarium as well, and it takes a few beats before one realizes that these are not creatures in another tank, but glass.

It is 70 degrees out there. The sun is shining brightly, nary a breeze stirring the abundant blossoms on the trees. The sharp point of Mount Hood and the squat bulge of Mount St. Helens glisten in pristine snow-covered white against the brilliant blue sky.

We're heading for a drought this summer, having received just more than 40% of our required rainfall this winter. Crops of all sorts are likely to fail because of the early mild weather that started the growing season too soon.

And I love rain, and winter; well, spring and autumn actually, but I prefer winter to summer, because I dislike heat, and I yearn for rain.

Summer however does have some advantages...
    

It turns out Mount St. Helens did not take kindly to being described as a "squat bulge" (see previous post). In fact, she worked herself up in such a tizzy that less than two hours after the post she blew her top.

We are about 60 miles away from her as the crow flies (give or take ten miles). Even during the major eruption in 1980 Vancouver was never in any direct danger from lava and the like - the biggest effect was the thick ash borne by the wind coating everything.

At this stage the wind is blowing from the west, and it carried the ash from yesterday east. We are south and west of the mountain.

The first image is the way we see her from here - mostly just the top peeking out. The second is a view from a hazy day when we visited the Johnston Ridge Observatory last August, before all the activity started. The log in the foreground is a casualty from the 1980 eruption.

There. I've posted the gratuitous mountain pictures.

While I'm posting gratuitous pictures...

A traveling amusement fair set up in a strip mall parking lot provided some interesting silhouettes to show off the local sunsets.

One thing about this job is that I rarely get to see the sunset on the short side of the equinoxes. What I have seen however, is that this region has an astonishing variety of sunsets, from the stunning and dramatic, through the gentle and the pretty, to the bland and unremarkable.

Which keeps life interesting, because you never know what's coming; you just have to wait and see.

I know why the clocks changed: To give me a second chance at watching the sunrise while driving to work!

Being this far north means that sunrise and sunset march swiftly in their respective directions throughout the year, smartly executing a 180 degree turn at the solstices, and resuming their speedy course in the opposite direction.n For some time now I have been driving to work in broad daylight -- a far cry from the darkness that enfolded me on my journey in midwinter.

The other side of the coin is of course that it will now most likely be light at least an hour after I reach home, a situation that has a perceptible effect on energy levels and how much we get done around the house.

Of course, by the end of the week we will have slipped into the new routine so well that we will all but have forgotten the fact that it has been a change.

But last night when I looked up from my reading because a strange glow had suffused the room, when I saw the sheers have turned a coppery opaque, glistening with each slight movement, when I got up to look out the window and saw the setting sun nestling cozily into the clouds for the night and I looked back at the clock to see 7.30, that is when I experienced an unbidden sense of wonder and awe.

I've been hi-jacking Sagnik's blog to trawl for helpful suggestions of what to do in Kolkata for three days in December. It seemed a very logical thing to do: ask for information on West Bengal from the place where there's a perpetual Bengali conference and party going on.

Unfortunately everyone seems to be too shy to answer, so I am opening this in a different forum too :-) The second part to the question is more specific: does anyone know anything personally about the Great Eastern hotel there?
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We still haven't managed to get to the tulip fields; the rain that was so scarce during the winter months have now returned, ensuring that the fields would be soggy and we'd be wet and miserable.

So I'm still making do with some of last years photographs, the title banner for the blog is a crop from one of those, and there's been a sprinkling earlier in the blog. Here is one more; amazing to see how much Angel Face has grown in a year!

As spring is moving slowly into summer - sometimes sputtering or turning back, at others racing ahead - lots of wonderful and weird things are sprouting everywhere.

(Spot the top end of an angel face playing dress-up!)

The weather has certainly been very unusual. Precipitation here is normally distributed as a bell curve over the academic year, i.e. with December/January at the center. Normally there is no significant rain from May through October.

This winter rain was intermittent, leading to dire drought warnings with only about 25% of the usual rainfall. Since then however the normally drier months have been thoroughly rain-soaked. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I love rain, and I dislike heat, so the weather has been kind to me bar a few scorchers here and there.

The character of rain here in the Pacific Northwest -- a light, continuous drizzle -- is quite different to that of the Highveld where I grew up, though. We used to have regular fierce thunderstorms with rain bucketing down. There were periods where the fluffy white clouds drifting lazily in the blue sky would suddenly puff up into monstrous cauliflowers at 3 p.m. as the heavens tore open with ear-splitting thunder and blinding flashes of light, chasing sheets of rain across the landscape, and by 4 p.m. the sun would be shining, the sky would be blue with similar dreamy cotton puffs, and only the raindrops glistening on the leaves would bear witness that the storm had indeed happened.

A week ago however I looked up from my book around 8.30 p.m. because of the strange nature of the light through the window. A real thunderstorm was brewing, turning the sunset into a spectacular display.

One of the reasons that I have not been posting frequently recently can be traced back to the above vista. Our section of the lab had our annual offsite at a lake about an hour from here. It turned out to be the perfect day for this kind of thing: clear and bright, not impossibly hot, and no hint of rain. That came a few days later.

While various land-based sporting activities were indulged in, and the grills brought forth various delicacies, including the garden burgers and boca burgers for the vegies like me, some people ventured onto (and into) the water. Among us we had three powerboats and an assortment of tubes, waterskis and boards.

The timid among us (which included me) made do with a lovely tour around the lake inside a boat. The more adventurous (definitely not me) did some of the kind of things you see below.

In the end, all had a good time, and went home with heads full of stats relating to the costs of boats and jetskis, new and used, and wondering where it might fit in the budget.

It has indeed been the "season of mists"; I don't know about the "mellow fruitfulness" part, although I believe a little east of us the apple harvest proceeded well.
This being the Pacific Northwest, autumn has also been the season of the returning rain but, barring a few spells of a couple of days each, we have not experienced much by way of particular cold.

There is a persistent fallacy that the Inuit (or Eskimo) have more than 20 words for snow -- in fact, they have just two. But driving to work in the early autumn mornings here certainly teaches one that there are a multitude of varieties of fog.

There is the low fog, the high fog, the thin fog, the dense fog, the all-encompassing fog, the patchy fog, the spooky tendril fog clinging, the wispy fog, the layered veil fog, the fog hugging the tree tops while leaving their trunks incongruously bare, the fog tucked cozily around the trunks letting the tops float eerily free, the dark fog with cloud cover behind it, and the bright fog with clear sky hidden behind its diaphonous curtain. And that's just the array over the first two weeks of the season!

On a mild morning with the mysterious, patchy fog playing hide and seek with the objects beside the road and providing interesting contrast to the bright autumn foliage taking flame all around, I stopped at a traffic light and swiveled my head to take in the beauty of the early hours.

Then an incongruous sight caught my eye: in the rear-view mirror I saw that behind me an open-topped jeep had pulled up. The driver had fuzzy silver hair ringing his bald pate and a moustache crawling along his upper lip; he was quite improbably perched on zebra-striped seat covers while, of all things, blowing into a harmonica which he directed back and forth with one hand while beating time with the other on the steering wheel, all the time rubbernecking to take in the beautiful morning, just as I had.

You've got to love living in the Pacific Northwest!

That's a big reason why we are living here - along of course with a few others like family and a job...

After twenty winters in Fargo, ND and before that, seven variously in Montreal, Winnipeg and West Virginia, my precious one vowed he never wanted a snowy winter again. But I am not fond of heat, and so some places were eliminated off the possible-settling-down-spots list right away.

This seemed to be a pretty good compromise - no, that does not do it justice. This was a place where both of us could be generally happy about the climate. Until, that is, the freak storms arrive.

We had snow here last Wednesday, and again this Tuesday and a bit on Wednesday. Two inches this last time. Which prompted schools to close for 3 whole days! And threw everyone else into a tizzy. Snow is so scarce here the entire city only has seven snow plows. Which meant that few roads were plowed, many iced over, and the going was tough and treacherous.

The return of the more usual rain here today melted most of the remaining snow and ice, and schools were open for the first (and last) day this week There were still people late in to work because of "the weather" but in general things returned to some semblance of normality.

But for a little while still I will have a tough time explaining to mpo just why we choose to live here...

The seasons were observed more on the calendar than in nature where I grew up; in summer it was green with some rain, in winter all the grass went yellow and it was chilly. Most of the trees were evergreen, so few were bare in winter, which also meant that there were few who got tender new leaves in spring. Sure, there were a a few blossoms around in spring, and there were a few bright leaves in autumn, but nothing too remarkable. And I had never seen snow where I lived.

And then I came to the US and fell in love with the seasons. For the first few years I was mostly in the midwest with the large swings; very hot and humid in the summers, foot upon foot of snow in the winter, stark bare trees that suddenly get a green fuzz at the first hint of spring to explode in a pastel dream of blossoms everywhere, and autumns where entire streets look aflame in hues of red and rust, orange and gold, yellow and blush.

We lived in the Bay area for a year, and found the weather too even, with very little to mark the passing of the seasons.

Now we are living in the Pacific Northwest, where the change of seasons is a little milder than the midwest; the heat is not as high in the summer, the cold is not as severe in winter, and we get a little snow once in a way, but we still have the brightly blossoming spring and the riotous colors of fall. In other words, the perfect combination!

And even though Washington is called the Evergreen state, there are plenty of deciduous trees
around to provide for spectacular autumns.