hudebnik | Entries tagged with weather

It's snowing. Fairly fast, with big fat flakes. And it's been cold enough recently that it might accumulate. But weather.com says it'll change to rain in an hour or two. Yuck.

Two weeks ago it was summer: we had the air conditioner on every day, we wore shorts and T-shirts and sandals, etc. For the past week or more I've been wearing long pants, sometimes a long-sleeved shirt, sometimes a sweatshirt to walk the dogs, and yesterday I wore SOCKS for the first time since April.

The storm passed through NYC quickly mid-day yesterday. Rain was minimal, but the wind was dramatic. There are reports of one man in Queens killed by a falling tree, and 200,000 "customers" (each of which may mean a single family, a single business, or an entire apartment building) losing power due to downed power lines. Our block is completely closed off by a trunk (say, 18" diameter at the point that it broke off from the rest of the tree) that fell across the street, and several other nearby blocks are likewise partially or totally closed by fallen trees. Two blocks from our home, two cars were stopped at a traffic light when a tree fell and trapped them; I gather the occupants got out safely. I've seen three or four cars with their windshields shattered, and a few squares of sidewalk upended to a 45-degree angle. But nothing fell on our house, or our garage, or our car, or us, and we didn't even lose power except for a few momentary flickers.

As of yesterday morning, there are about three tiny little green leaves on the top branch of the potted pomegranate tree that lives on the enclosed porch. I won't swear they weren't there the previous week, but they certainly haven't been there all winter. Happy Candlemas, or Brigd, or Groundhog Day, or whatever!

This tree started in a pomegranate we ate on New Year's Eve, 2008-2009. We put a few of the seeds in moist paper towels, a few of them germinated, we moved them to small flowerpots, and the one that survived popped its head above ground on Obama's inauguration day.

We bought a pomegranate to eat with our festive dinner on New Year's Eve 2008. Pomegranates have lots of seeds, so I put a few of them in between damp paper towels to see if they would sprout. Several did, so I put them in a small pot of soil, and on Barack Obama's inauguration day, two of them emerged above the surface.

One died fairly soon, but the other grew into a two-foot-tall, gracefully cascading mini-tree, looking sorta like a weeping willow. Which died last fall. I didn't get around to throwing it out, and occasionally watered it in the vain hope that it wasn't really dead.

And it's not: as of yesterday morning, there are little green leaves popping out at all the joints. Deciduousness is a thing.

On the other hand, the African violet (or something like that) that we were given at the door on the way out of last year's Easter service appears to be really and truly dead. Death is a thing too.

The sun over Berkeley, CA, only 4 PM but with a lot of smoke in the air from the Camp Fire

We arrived home Monday afternoon after a week's vacation. It was a rainy day, and we were jet-lagged, so we didn't get to the raspberry bushes until Tuesday. There were lots of berries, but the majority of them were covered with grey mold:

This is apparently a common problem of fall raspberries, especially when the weather has been wet. I still got over a cup of usable berries yesterday, and half a cup today, but I've spent much more time picking and discarding moldy berries than retrieving good ones for use. There are a variety of sprays recommended for this stuff, but I think the main preventive measure is trimming the canes so there's good air flow to dry things out.

And the quinces are still infested with oriental fruit moths. I put out a few thousand eggs of a wasp species that parasitizes oriental fruit moths, one tab every few weeks throughout the summer, and I think the fruits look better from the outside than they did last year, but still every windfall fruit that I've cut open has been largely worm-dirt.

OK, 1258 or 1315 it's not, but annoying nonetheless.

We had an inch of snow last week, but this is the first snowfall of the winter that anyone would bother shoveling. The blizzard warning says "accumulations of 15-20 inches" before the storm tapers off around midnight, but I think that may be an underestimate: as of 10:00 AM, I measured 10" on the front steps and 15" in the middle of the lawn. It's still falling at a good clip. I shoveled the steps and halfway to the sidewalk, just so there's a bit less shoveling to do later on and so the dogs can get out and relieve themselves. It's lovely, fluffy snow, neither slush nor powder.

Being snowed in would be a lot more fun if the oven worked. As nearly as I can tell, the bottom igniter gave up the ghost two or three days ago: the stove and broiler still work, but not the thermostat-controlled "oven" part. The recommended procedure to confirm that the igniter needs replacing involves an electric multimeter, which I had for many years but which has disappeared in the past few months (I have a vague memory of throwing it away because I couldn't find all the parts). An igniter costs about $65 and can apparently be installed by an ordinary person, but I don't know if anybody within (say) five miles would have igniters for this particular model of oven in stock, and I'm certainly not driving anywhere to get one today. I guess we can mail-order an igniter and just not bake anything for the next few days. We still have, as mentioned above, various other cooking devices: stove, broiler, microwave, crockpot, waffle iron, sandwich press, etc. And if we REALLY need to bake something, we can use the broiler in combination with an oven thermometer.

If the storm takes out our electric power, of course, all we've got is the stove.

Edit, 7 PM: I did another round of shoveling after brunch, and another just now. There are 27" in the middle of the front lawn.

Edit, 9 AM Sunday: The snow plows have come through, both in front and in back of the house. Which means there's a sizable wall of snow between the curb and the roadway, in addition to the stuff between the garage and the curb.

Roses, in more or less full bloom. On January 3 in New York.

March 31. There's an inch of fresh snow on the ground outside my office, and it took me an hour and twenty minutes to drive to work. (I normally take the train, but I have to pick up

shalmestere from a doctor's appointment this afternoon so I drove.)

When we woke this morning, the snow had already stopped falling. There was about a foot on the front sidewalk, so I shoveled it off, saw shalmestere off to her gamba class, and took the Things to the park.

After shalmestere got back, we went to the local art theater to see "Life of Pi", which was gorgeous and surreal and disturbing and all that. Walked home amid melting snow.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Last week I called one of our regular dog-sitters to ask about her availability for some upcoming weekend dates. When I finally got her on the phone, she said "I haven't gotten back into my house yet. When I came back after the evacuation, there was a forty-foot boat in my front yard. I had four feet of sea water in my [one-story] house. Everything was destroyed: furniture, clothing, appliances, everything. I've been living in a hotel for seven weeks, and my own dogs are still in boarding. They say there's some chance of me getting back into the house in February."

There are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people in her situation.

One of my department colleagues, who lives much farther from the ocean, got back into his house only around Christmas, and the last time I spoke to him he still had power in only half the outlets in the house.

Well, the good news is that we don't have to worry about the 100-year-old maple on the corner falling on our house. The bad news is that it fell the other way, blocking both streets at the aforementioned corner. And, of course, that we've lost another 100-year-old tree -- this makes at least four within a block of our house in the past five years.

Added after sunrise...

The view from our bedroom window:

From ground level:

And another tree a block away:

Current Location: Queens, NY
Current Music: wind

[transcribed from paper diary]
The plan from here:
Sunday (today): Musee d'Orsay
Monday:
Tuesday: Angers 08-36-35-35-35
Wednesday: the Louvre, yet again
Thursday: Senlis/Chantilly
Friday:
Saturday: Provins
Sunday: wander Paris
Monday: fly to NYC, see Dorothy, Charles, Odo & Basbeaux, etc

Lunch & snacks: 11€. Dinner: 30.50€ (card) Boat tour: 19€

Museé d'Orsay today. There was a long line, because it's the first Sunday of the month, when this and many other museums are free. We saw a variety of 19th-century Romantic sculptures, Arts & Crafts furniture, models of architecture, and a special exhibit on Piet Mondrian's early years, which showed quite clearly the path he travelled from realist with touches of Impressionism, through luminism, cubism, to (not included in the exhibition) his later pure geometric figures of pure colors.

We also wandered around the Jardin des Tuilleries, since (mirabile visu) the weather was clear, warm, and sunny. But by 4:00

shalmestere was exhausted, so we returned to the hotel and, without meaning to, both took a two-hour nap. We then went out for dinner, walked to l'Ile de la Cité, and took a guided boat tour up and down the Seine. Touristy, yes, but quite enjoyable, and not obscenely expensive. The guide mentioned that "if you spent twenty seconds in front of each item on display and the Louvre, day and night, it would take you three months to see everything" in the "18 km of hallways". She also pointed out the oldest house in Paris (on the northeastern side of l'Ile St-Louis) and the smallest (just east of the Museé d'Orsay, facing the river).