May 21, 2010
Lovely rhapsody created by the wind up behind Nat Bailey Stadium last night. A tick, tick, clang on the flag pole, while the tarp was whipping it up. And a screen broadcast Japanese flag and adverts and green lights out to a completely empty baseball pitch. Are they advertising to the sparrows now? Targeting les nuages, tapping new overhead markets. I seemed to be the only one benefitting up there in the car park. A nice windy look out point during a storm.
January 5, 2010
#5 in the mixed media tea blends: dirty day blend
The dirty day blend. #5
Two tablespoons of Ahmad London Ceylan Earl Grey
One tablespoon of Twinnings Darjeeling pink tin leaves.
Well how do you think it would taste?
Exactly.
That’s how it tasted.
By the hot drop, let it sit, added another half pot of water, it was mightier, but still reserved in the way the dirty day outside was. Did you see how long it took to shift? It didn’t. It just stared at you with one eye cocked daring you to question it while you receive nothing but a grunt in response. That was the day, that was the blend.
December 4, 2009
A dip in the temperature has sharpened the old mental faculty. The various weather events, as previously detailed in this unrolling blatheration, thrill me in their individual ways. I think my weather intrigue springs from being part of the Sealink Ferry generation. The wind in Mayo has it’s own patois. But the most informative snippet I ever heard about the weather came not from a scientist or a web based reading but from an Icelandic postwoman who I followed on her route in Reykjavik I think it was in 94 as research for a story I was trying to cultivate.
I recall her explaining to me that everybody thinks the weather is all kinds of things and usually terrible, but if you are out in it, she explained it’s really not bad at all. I think she was galloping along with a big bag at the time, me at her heels, eyes a-opened, listening intently for something, and probably not expecting to hear that. In my imagination I had concocted the world of Icelandic post women as something far beyond what the reality entailed.
Back in the sorting office, we gathered with the other women for their coffee break around flasks and during the chatter (quite a bit of why on earth are you interested in the post office) the conversation turned to music. We talked briefly of music incl Bjork (she’s very special) and I think we talked about low pay and much more. It was the weather reflection that stayed with me for I found that once I was indeed out in the weather and actually in it, paying attention to it, it was precisely as she’d described.
When I am looking at the weather I can find it vexing, but by getting underneath it, I have a whole other relationship with it. And that relationship includes moments of oppression, of marvel, wonder, despair and what if? I established this relationship in a country where it can be every season within fifteen minutes.
November 22, 2009
The rain continues to slant in the light of the lamp posts day after day. Ceasing for periods of recess of approx 10 mins twice a day. Rivers have burst their banks in three countries to my knowledge at the same time. Vancouver Island around Duncan has floods to their doorknobs, Cork City has no drinking water, the 110 ft Christmas tree collided with the Shannon Bridge, roads in the West are completely impassable (Claremorris very flooded) and the army are out. In Cumbria the situation is equally drastic and other parts of England.
Historically our weather systems are in opposition. If it’s pouring there, not the case here. Somehow all the rain lined up in unison.
For our December forecast here on the West Coast, based on this wet pattern, the suggestion I read today is that when colder weather system moves in it, the likelihood of snow is high with these conditions. Here’s a link to the animated radar from Environment Canada (scroll down). And the more widescreen, tapestry of satellite radar — my preferred view for weather enlightenment. (click play, and speed it up for a remix version!)
May 15, 2009
Somnolence
It usually takes an uncanny weather story to lift me from my bloggled somnolence.
This is the tale from today’s Graun about a gal nun that took to a cave for a number of years, hermit solidudette.
Here’s the para that sparked me up
I was ready to do a long retreat - three years in complete solitude. Once we had a huge blizzard that raged for seven days and nights, the snow covered the door and window and the whole cave was in complete blackness. I thought: "This is it." Looking back, I'm amazed I wasn't claustrophobic. I felt perfectly calm and resigned. Then I heard a voice say, "Shovel out." I used a saucepan lid and dug a tunnel out. It took an hour or two and I did it three times but survived to tell the tale.
September 27, 2008
Treasure
Crikey, think I just alighted upon my true calling….though Environment Canada are so conservative in their assessments. We’ll be deluged with epic rain and their assessment will read “light drizzle”.
CANWARN is the Canadian Weather Amateur Radio Network. These are amateurs supporting Environment Canada with eyeball reports of severe weather as it passes through their area. Environment Canada can watch storms coming through on radar and satellite imagery, but they cannot see what is happening UNDER the clouds.
A note of caution before readers get to ecstatic and race off to sign up:
CANWARN members are not storm chasers. Rather than chasing the weather, we wait for the weather to come to us!
I am co-operating fully with the later instruction, merely keep my close encounters to ruminating on the radars of places I’ve never been. I wish this font would be similarly co-operative.
June 23, 2008
Flourish
Prepare for flurry of weather centric posts …
In a round up of weather related worrying and reading I came across this article headlined Expert: Scientific reasons behind year’s weather. The second paragraph read
At least one Iowa City resident said she thinks the weather in Iowa this year, along with the seemingly apocalyptic flurry of earthquakes, deadly tornados and other natural disasters around the globe might be a sign from above.
“I think the end is near,” Linda Lewis said Friday.
I should point out the Mrs Lewis is not the expert in the article, but I was comforted to see another weather wonderer who relies on absolutely no science for her wondering. I’ve questioned whether it’s resolvable being entirely illiterate in science and concurrently obsessed with the weather.
I’ve muttered my way through some hardware shop discussions with perplexed employees as I complain about the selection of barometers they stock, whilst not being entirely clear what barometers actually do. I’ll ask do they measure air pressure without really having a clue what the purpose of measuring air pressure is, but since it matters to weather people, so it too matters abstractly to me.
June 22, 2008
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century
From Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent:
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.
Read the rest here.
Meanwhile on this side of the water they’re decking it out over whether or not to implement a carbon tax federally and some are hiccuping over the already introduced Provincial tax on petrol. Now lads, a bit closer to home, this might help you make up your minds…
The researchers say sea levels could be expected to rise by four to six meters by 2100 as part of a long-term trend towards five to ten meters. A six meter rise in sea level would put 91 per cent of Richmond, and 76 per cent of Delta underwater; the entire airport and ferry terminal at Tsawwassen would be lost to the sea; and the current erosion counter-measures around Point Grey and North Vancouver would be overwhelmed, threatening to plunge much of UBC into the ocean.
Read more here
Curiously there’s been recent, slightly rabid muttery protests about the introduction of a new bus route in our area! A bus, God help us.
December 24, 2007
George Eliot fogged in throat and head
In keeping with my curiosity for all things literary and meteorological here is George Eliot or Pollian as she signs the letter beleaguered by fog on 13 November 1852..
“O this hideous fog! Let me grumble for I have had headache the last three days and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney?…”
From a letter to The Brays. (Selections from George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon S Haight published by Yale Univ Press).
Meteorological-chondria perhaps. I had no idea fog could give a headache and choke you. All Dickensian induced romance on fog is henceforth abruptly dumped. Though Pollian might these days have benefitted from the lack of light according to the new thinking on the dangers of light pollution.
December 16, 2007
May 29th 1835
From Eugenie De Guerin’s journal: (pardon the accent omissions)
“Never did a storm last so long, it is raging yet. For the last three days the thunder and rain have held their revels. All the trees bend under the deluge: it is cruel to see them look so wearied and faint amidst the bright triumph of May…”
May! Jaysus! A three-day storm in May? Crikey. A nice meteorological nugget to ponder from 1835 as we brace for global warming.