Bi-Weekly Topic for Aug. 1, 2004
It's not just you and the scenery; whereever you go, there's something else ...
Heavy weather
By Hoarded Ordinaries
The problem with trying to describe a place is there’s so much that falls beyond the limits of even the largest narrative and photographic frame. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know my fondness for photographing parts of buildings. I like to take pictures of windowsills, doorways, and windows, and I particularly like to take pictures of the corners and edges of said apertures. Very rarely on this blog will you see an entire building; instead, you’ll see various pieces and parts. (If you click on any of the above links, you’ll want to scroll down to see the various images I’m talking about.)
My brother-in-law used to do architectural photography, meaning that firms would hire him to capture in images new construction or renovations to existing structures. When you think about it, it’s a daunting task to capture the shape and structure of an entire building…how much more daunting is it to capture the mood, nuance, and feel of an entire town, word and image being your only tools?
These days here in New Hampshire it’s been warm and humid. At any moment those of you reading this blog from far-flung sites on the globe can scroll down toward the bottom of my blog sidebar and see a weather graphic that gives a semi-current update on Keene’s weather conditions. But does knowing that the temperature this morning at 3:15 am was a mild-sounding 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Centigrade) tell you anything of what it felt like to be tossing and turning in a blanket-free bed at that hour of the morning? Would it help if I mentioned that the humidity at that ungodly hour was a whopping 83%, the air a euphemistic “calm”?
There are some of you reading this blog who live in hotter climes than what we here in southern New Hampshire face in the summertime. Since I complained so emphatically last winter when I walked the dog in unbearably sub-zero temperatures, I try not to bitch and moan too mightily now that the weather is warm, the air humid, and everyone’s feeling sluggish. Many folks from Massachusetts and other parts of New England vacation in New Hampshire; in this land of summer cottages and RV parks, we get a lot of snowbirds migrating up from their retirement homes in Florida and points south. But if you’re vacationing in a lake-front cottage these days, you have recourse to said lake when things get too steamy. And even if you’re sweating your way to the top of one of our heart-pounding mountain-tops, at least there’s the promise of a cooling breeze at the summit.
When you live rather than vacation in a place like Keene, though, you have to tolerate her meteorological moods while dealing with the mundane details of daily life. I don’t live next to a lake; I’m not spending my days (although perhaps I should) sitting on a beach with a margarita in one hand and a fan in the other. Those of you who live in hotter climes generally enjoy the benefit of nearly ubiquitous air conditioning. Our modest apartment here in Keene, on the other hand, is not air-conditioned, and the a/c in our 11-year-old, 227,000-mile trusty blue Subaru doesn’t work. So if these days the humidity sometimes weighs heavily on our souls–if we dare to admit that some nights we lie abed naked on top of the sheets wishing that the perpetually humming window fan would please, please send some stagnant air this way, please–well, you have to spare us some sympathy. We’re semi-arctic creatures, here in New Hampshire. We’re used to burrowing beneath layers of flannel and fleece and wool, not lying draped and semi-liquified under pressing acres of warm, heavy air.
Even a sunny California guy like Shane admits that New Hampshire is humid. Los Angeles and other near-the-ocean cities have the benefit of seabreezes, a phenomenon I once heard a San Diego weatherman refer to as “Mother Nature’s air conditioning.” Here in New Hampshire, again, the air has been calm, heavy, and inert. These days that mood is contagious, the option of going to an air-conditioned movie theatre feeling like both a blessing (ah, cool air!) and an act of exertion: man, that film was exhausting!
These days elck and several spiritually minded bloggers have started an email list for folks interested in Literary Approaches to the Unorthodox Pursuit of Enlightenment. One of the tantalizing ideas buzzing through the inboxes of said LAUPEs is the idea of holding a face-to-face retreat of like-minded bloggers. As various potential sites are being bandied about by members of this international and eclectic group, lovely Leslee suggested that humble Keene, NH be considered as a potential site for said meet-up “since Lorianne has been relentlessly describing her neck of the woods as heaven on earth.” I must admit, I love it here in Keene, and the thought of such an illustrious group of bloggers descending upon my town is a delight: after kicking myself for missing Shane’s brief breeze through town, I relish the fantasy of hiking Mt. Monadnock, touring old cemeteries, visiting local pubs, and even packing the walls of our tiny Zen Group with the likes of Cassandra or Tish or Anne. If nothing else, imagine the joyous photos we’d take of sun-drenched windowsills, doorways, and windows, all of them filled with smiling-faced and enlightened Vernacular Bodies.
But before you pack your bags for a Keene retreat, keep in mind that the weight of heaven-on-earth can be heavy. Even celestial clouds can bake in summer’s sun, and clouds themselves are mostly moisture, a polite euphemism for the the dreaded “humidity.” The road to heaven–or to Keene, NH–can be uncomfortable at times: be sure the a/c in your car is working. Even if you can stomach the thought of withstanding the Zen Mama’s voluminous outpourings of Hot Air, be forewarned that Keene gets her share of heavy weather.
This post is my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic Weather & Place. Anyone who feels like blogging their favorite place-based weather stories–and we all have them–should consider posting a link on Ecotone, another meeting place for cooler-than-cool like-minded bloggers.Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/08/page/4/
Donner und Blitzen
One of the enduring mental images of my years in Central New York I saw as I was waiting
for a traffic light near my home. It was July 3 or 4 and the day was hot and oppressive. But as I sat, sweating in my hot car, I could see a thunderstorm building beyond the commercial buildings around me. It already blocked the sun, and an area of frightening black was spreading beneath the cloud.
Against that fearsome dark, there rose a Roman candle. It arced up, across the black, and popped squarely in the middle of my line of sight.
Wow, I thought. What a metaphor for defiance in the face of overwhelming might -- or else for human futility in the face of nature.
Where I come from in the Catskills, thunderstorms have a certain dignity. Half the time, a summer storm never makes it to your side of the mountain in the first place, but when it does, it savors each peal of thunder -- FLASH/BOOM tick tick tick FLASH/BOOM tick tick tick, as if to conserve its limited energies. And, given the effort involved in shoving a storm sideways across a range of hills and valleys, those energies are limited.
Central New York seemed to generate downpours -- a certain amount of thunder and lightning, but accompanied by gully-washers that seemed to be solid water. I spent my 30th birthday huddled under a dining fly in the midst of such a downpour -- messy but survivable.
Nothing in my New York experience prepared me for Ohio storms. They don't fool around out here.
The first time one caught us out of doors, my wife and I th
ought to settle into our car in a sheltered spot and watch it go by. By and by we noticed it seemed to have a halo of lightning. It was sparking away like a Van de Graaf generator, in all directions, and the noise from it was prodigal and continuous. It looked a bit like a Keystone Kops scene with the Kops coming on, hanging off all the sides of a car and waving their arms and nightsticks -- except lightning is not to be trifled with. We were spooked, and we drove away from there.
These energetic boomers rattle through Cleveland regularly. You can hear them far away at night -- boom, boom, boombity boom, boombity, boombity boom. If you've ever kicked, or imagined kicking, a garbage can down a long stretch of park stairs, you'll know what it sounds like. Doomed to wakefulness for the next hour, you lie in bed and wonder if you should close the windows, wonder if the cars are buttoned up, wonder if there will be damage. And all around you lies the close dark, giving no answers but boombity, boombity.
Local television tries to improve on these post-midnight wonderings. They're up to "triple Doppler" weather radar now, and with it, they can point to the spots where the storm is (gasp!) BEGINNING TO ROTATE (so kiss your roof, and your a--, goodbye!).
The fact is, thunderstorms often rotate. If the circle gets tight enough and the action intense enough, you can get a funnel cloud. If the funnel cloud gets big enough, you have a problem. The TV people, not unaware that tornadoes generate excitement, always want to be first to point them out -- so the hype quotient gets really high.
I do
n't have to listen to Channel 5 to know I'm not in the Catskills anymore. I can hear the proof itself rattling across the city on its way from somewhere to somewhere else.
But this year, I have twice seen something truly Midwestern, and unlike anything else I have ever seen elsewhere -- spent thunderstorms.
It stands to reason, of course, that thunderstorm cells would eventually wear out, lose their moisture and their energy and go back to being ordinary air -- just as an eddy in around the pilings of a pier might swirl and drag a little junk around before going back to being ordinary, calm water. But I had never seen it until I drove along Ohio's Interstate highways an hour after a front passed through.
Hanging in the moist air to one side of the road was a fluffy, disorganized cloud. Below it hung the veil of mist that indicated it was still raining -- but was it? The veil looked like an ice-cream scoop, hollow in the middle and curled to one side, and after staring a while (for what else do you have to do on an Interstate when the traffic is quiet?) I realized that the air in the center of the hollow was rising still, and gently pulling the mist, and probably any remaining rain, with it. Exhausted, the cloud had rained itself out and was waiting to be scooped up by some more energetic one.
A couple of months later, I saw the phenomenon again. This time, over the flat lands near Toledo, I could watch for miles as the setting sun picked out a couple of great circles of cloud. Golden in the last sunlight, with blue sky beyond them, they seemed utterly calm, but I thought they could only have been formed by considerable violence, and I guessed the circular strip must be at the edge of the dying eddy. Far beyond, the same sunlight caught the tops of new thunderheads rolling across the plains. The scene was majestic and vast, with the small, shiny traffic pouring along the highway, green fields and forests beyond, the blue and gold of the spent clouds leading the eye to the white and gray of the active ones far in the distance.
I'd like to say my spirit rose and expanded with the vision. Actually, my overtired daughter was melting down in the back seat and I was busy managing my self-control. If all that was God's way of protecting the girl from some dire punishment I never actually thought of, all I can say is that He went to a lot of trouble. I hope that someday she will appreciate it.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/T-Rex,thestorm.html
Over There
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
The year after I finished my degree in England I went to work in Paris for a year. I had done a short secretarial course in Cambridge, England, which in those days invariably involved learning shorthand, which I got good at quite fast and then taught myself shorthand in French. (I can still remember the contraction for “Dans l’expression de mes sentiments distingus,” the equivalent of which is “Sincerely yours” in American business English.) I got a job in a French insurance agency. This was my first, and only, corporate job, apart from a translation gig in college for a Spanish agricultural engineering firm.
The unit I worked in at Faugre et Jutheau was reinsurance: a big game where the insurance companies themselves are insured by others. Lots of money; it’s like corporate Vegas. Anyway, many of the “jobs” the company reinsured were in the United States. And many of the US “jobs” that needed reinsuring were because of the weather. Why? L bas, c’est pas une blague, le temps. (The weather over there is no joke.)
Hurricanes and tornadoes. Hailstones the size of canteloupes. Freezing temperatures that would glue your hand to your car door if you were stupid enough to leave your gloves inside. Heat that rivals anything, most anywhere, including the Sahara.
For all this unjoking weather, I’ve fetched up in the California Central Valley, close enough to the Sacramento River Delta that we get a cooling breeze each night in summer, so that even if it’s been well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit—over 40 centigrade—during the day, it almost always cools down at night. (We’ve lived here five years or so and have never turned on the air conditioner.) In winter occasionally it freezes but mostly we have to contend with the local version of purgatory, the Tule Fog, where you can barely see your hand if you stretch it out in front of you.
Subtle, this version of weather, once you weather it a bit. (We don’t even really get earthquakes here, which are what other Americans claim keeps them from moving to California—though they seem perfectly happy to live in tornado country and the like).
I imagine the first inhabitants of the Sacramento Valley used all of this weather to help them survive. The fog is a powerful blind to a hunter; compelling thirst would drive prey to water. Lots of food grows in this climate. It was probably close to someone’s version of paradise, long ago.
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Weather and Place.
Posted by Pica at 04:43 PM in Nature and Place | Link |- Mama says that the reason we moved to L.A. from Chicago in 1969 is that she just couldn’t stand the weather anymore—intensely humid summers, intensely cold wintery winters, and then the wind… So L.A. with its limitless summers (that’s the myth) ended up being the place where we spent most of our lives. Even though we did try to leave many times over the 30 years before I finally left, we, then I, always ended up returning… For the weather? So when I finally left Los Angeles for Davis four years ago, back in my mind, I asked myself if I would return there to live again as I had always done. How does one make a place home? Before I had ever even heard of Davis, I regarded the great Central Valley as that long hot boring drive we had to endure to get to lovely San Francisco. It was never a place I thought I would make home. But love changes things. And then there’s the weather. Recently, some out-of-town visitors got me thinking about our weather here. Folks from as far as Anchorage and as near as Berkeley asked how we could stand the heat. Glibly, I replied, “I don’t mind it.” Now, a few days later, while doing some weeding around the base of our peach tree, I realized that living with a fruit tree has changed me. It, like all peach trees, produces fruit that only reaches its full sweetness when the heat really sets in. L.A. peaches never quite do it as well. These same out-of-town visitors enjoyed and praised the fruit from our tree to no end during their visit. So, complaining about the heat ends up being hypocritical, actualy, because luscious summer fruits like peaches, plums, apricots… and then the presagers of all that bounty (and my favorite) cherries.. all these rely on the same heat that all those juicy peach eaters so maligned. I have to admit now that I like the weather because it keeps me more attuned to the natural world. And that world keeps working on me as visions of returning to L.A. recede. There might be another lesson here. If I let the sun work on me, perhaps my full sweetness will emerge as well.
— virginia 2. August 2004, 06:46 Link - Folks, I just finished filing my 2004 tax return using Turbo Tax Online. Turbo Tax Online can be linked to from http://turbo-tax.service-net.eu.com. An alternative website for your 2004 tax return using TurboTax Online. TurboTax Online can be linked to from http://turbotax.service-net.eu.com Later.
— Turbo Girl 4. February 2005, 15:39 Link
Climbing Algonquin Peak
By Via Negativa
This is Via Negativa's 400th post. I think I'll also make it my submission for Ecotone Wiki's bi-weekly topic, Weather and Place. I feel very fortunate that the day we picked (last Thursday) to climb Algonquin - the 2nd-highest peak in the Adirondacks - featured a mix of sun and low-hanging clouds. Views are best when not everything is revealed at once.
The approach passes through alder swamp, sugar bush, hemlock stand. Here and there the rotting hulks of beeches, killed by the blight. A couple of rumbles usher in a brief rain shower. Afterwards, the scent of balsam seems even stronger than before. Sometimes you see it first, sometimes you just smell it.
*
From the base of the mountain all the way to the timberline, the one constant theme is paper birch. All else seems mere punctuation. Yet the guidebook claims this is a modern aberration, the legacy of fires that followed the clearcuts a hundred years ago. The short-lived birches rot as readily as they burn. Someday soon the conifers will reclaim all the upper slopes, and lightning won't be able to take any more than it can touch.
*
The trail maintenance workers have placed stepping stones through a slough of mud. I hop along awkwardly in my heavy boots. My daypack flaps against my back, canteen flops against my belly. I wouldn't remember any of this were it not for the soundtrack provided by a winter wren, its long and liquid air. I stop, taking in whole lungfuls at time.
*
Higher, climbing into the blossoming of plants in berry down below. Water trickles from the mountain's every pore.
*
Generations of hikers' boots have cut this mountain to the bone. We scramble up a bare granite trough through the ever-more-compressed forest of birch and balsam and spruce. The rocks are scored with shallow scratches, too brief and random for a glacier. Very large dogs with unclipped toenails, I wonder? Just then two hikers round the bend wielding alpine hiking poles - imagine ski poles without the horizontal projections for grabbing the surface of the snow. I envy their superior footing, even as I wince at the metallic racket. On either side of the trail the moss and humus lie thick as a mattress under the tangle of krummholz.
*
The trees start to shrink at a most convenient elevation. Every pause for breath takes my breath away. I peer out over the tortured crowns at the grand sweep of lakes and mountains stretching off into the haze. My hiking companion gathers spruce needles for our noontime tea. Clouds and the shadows of clouds. The shimmering lakes. The dark mountains.
*
What's this, a black-capped chickadee singing in a foreign language? No, a separate species: the boreal chickadee. I had forgotten such a thing existed, if I had ever known. Strange to think they've been here all the time, with the equally unfamiliar Bicknell's thrushes and pine martens. And how must we appear to them, popping up out of the elfin forest in our brightly-colored gear? Like chickadees everywhere they can't resist coming in for a closer look.
*
For the last mile, a series of signs has warned sternly against the folly of proceeding any higher without the proper gear, and has exhorted us to protect the vegetation by staying on the trail. Now on the summit, we encounter an actual plant cop, on duty here all summer. "Hi, my name's Kristen, and I'm the summit steward today!" I resist the urge to ask for fresh ground pepper in my soup. The truth is, I'm envious of her job.
*
When the clouds roll in, one thinks: this could be the coast of Labrador. Those waxy, pointy leaves wearing thick coats of down on the side away from the sun - that's Labrador tea. Those yellow flowers like a child's crayon sun: alpine goldenrod. We spot three-toed cinquefoil, mountain sandwort, various branched and crustose lichens. Something very small that darts behind a pebble. Two bold juncos.
*
We find a shelf of rock facing east where we can sit and watch the clouds swirl past, ogling the iconic, landslide-scarred face of Mt. Colden whenever they clear. The lunch is as luxurious as I can manage; my only regret is the absence of a white linen tablecloth. After tea - Earl Grey steeped with spruce - I sit with my back against the stone. My companion lies supine for a while, and finally says, I can feel the whole mountain underneath me.
*
I do not need to be alone in the wilderness, though I do share King Cormac's view that one should speak quietly in it, if at all. I like watching the tiny figures of hikers moving around slowly on other, nearby summits, and imagining all the folks congregating on Mt. Marcy, still shrouded in clouds. And I'm impressed by how many people have carried stones to the summit. This smacks a bit of carrying coal to Newcastle, and I'm not entirely convinced it's needed, but it is a neat way to get people involved in "healing the wounds." The summit stewards are restoring the fragile vegetation one square foot at a time. Each rescued patch must be edged in stones to ward off careless boots. People who come here want to do right, most of them. The summit steward has a kind word for each hiker who eagerly tells her they've carried up a rock.
*
The way back down is slow, each step studied carefully in advance. The farther we descend, the more the massed mountain above us weighs down our feet and makes our legs tremble.
*
The return along the approach trail seems endless and unfamiliar. How could we have missed it on the way in, all this sameness?
*
After supper and a brief walk to the lake, I crawl into my tent and collapse. I lie sleepless on my back for hours, feeling the mountain in every bone and muscle. I don't remember my dreams.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041129172208/neithernor.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_neithernor_archive.html#10914703506042924
The Sundowner
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on weather and place.
Art, Lynn, and their two kids passed through Davis today. We had a picnic lunch at the Village Homes green -- Art wanted to tour and photograph the development -- before they continued their trip north. Art is an ecological designer and on this trip was headed to a workshop on cob building techniques. It was fun seeing them today; it's been several years.
During 1997-1998, while I was still in grad school at UC Santa Barbara, we rented their house out while they spent a year living in Mexico. Their house is a funky cabin located in a canyon at an elevation about 1200 feet above the city of Santa Barbara in a small community called the Trout Club. Their house has about 40 different types of fruit trees in their yard, solar hot water heating, and grey water irrigation. It was a magical place to live for a while.
We took advantage of the commute. It is 9 miles each way to the UCSB campus, and the way back involves a climb of about 1400 feet. Considering this a challenge, we rode our bikes to and from campus about three days each week. The ride up the hill (Old San Marcos Road) is long and steep in parts but it became a type of meditation.
Some days it would be a lot harder than others because of the strong sundowner winds that set up late in the afternoon occasionally in the region. These are fierce, hot, downslope winds that blow down the canyons of the Santa Ynez range, in part associated with a high-pressure cell over the Great Basin. The steepest bit of the ride, near the top, involves a set of hairpin turns. If there was a sundowner, we'd be in the lee of the hill until we left the final hairpin, at which point we'd almost be blown off our bikes!
Posted by Numenius at August 2, 2004 11:07 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/08/02/the_sundowner.html
fog's munificence
By alembic
Posted for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic, Weather and Place.
This is also my 400th post ... and marks (as of tomorrow) 2 years of blogging under the aegis of alembic..
* * *
I live on the edge of the cresting waves of fog that, during most of the summer, come in from the Pacific and rush over the ridges of Mt. Tamalpais, only to vanish mysteriously in the sunny world of my valley. Here, in this little valley, the sun strews the tide-driven waters of the Corte Madera Creek with glitter, even as a few miles to the south, the world over the ridge is washed of color in the antiseptic grey of the fog that had seized it.
I never tire of watching the shifting shape of this fog that's far enough for me to behold without my having to be caught up in its bone-chilling folds but close enough to keep the mornings and evenings cool enough to make me want start the day with a hot cup of tea and end it with blankets drawn up to my chin ' even if during the middle of the late summer days I often find myself looking for the shelter of shade, the breeze of fans ... anything to get away from the languorous heat of a noon that simply won't quit.
Can the concept of privilege be extended to weather? Because, for at least 10 months out of the year, I can say that, as far as the weather is concerned, I am truly spoiled. If I want to experience a touch of winter in July, all I have to do is to head south 12 miles or so, to San Francisco, where Mark Twain found 'the coldest winter one summer.' If I want to bask in the full heat of sun, well, I can head north about 30 miles, and I'll be in the wine country, that ersatz Italy that seems more Italian than Italy, which each passing season.
Of course, all it takes to upset this balance and unperch me from that comfortable position on the edge of all kinds of weather is one butterfly that flutters its wings ' and you know the rest: winds shift, oceans swell, climates change.... A preview of that comes every year with the end of summer, when the fog stops rolling in over the hills.
Already, as August moves on, the fog is thinning with each day. Come September and October, the sun, unencumbered by the whims of fog, will make up for lost time, bearing down with a hot vengeance that will wilt and wither gardens and fill the skies with haze. Some days, that haze will be thicker and more acrid from fires that will rage, as they do every year, to the north or west of us. Still, here at the border of sun and fog, where the winds patrol shifting borders, where strips of land shrink and grow with tides that mix the salty waters of the ocean with that of creeks from the mountains ... I feel in awe of so much bounty.
Posted by maria at August 09, 2004 12:04 PM
Comments
I'm leaving only a humbled, "me too."
And, of course, a congratulations on your 400th post! Hail alembic, long may she reign. (Or rain. We are talking weather, here.)
Posted by: Siona on August 9, 2004 03:52 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041014103553/www.ashladle.org/archives/000400.html#000400
Aug 1, 2004 at 12:03 pm
I’m looking at that Help Wanted sign and thinking I might just move to Keene. Work in a photo shop. Yep.
Aug 1, 2004 at 12:30 pm
Hey, I like the new picture of yourself, Lorianne. (New to me anyway - this is the first I’ve been here in a week.) Very professorial, in a low-key kind of way.
Aug 1, 2004 at 7:24 pm
this. weather. sucks.
Aug 1, 2004 at 7:58 pm
I just wanted to second Dale’s compliment. It’s a lovely photo.
But while I’m here, thank you for the reminder of the nuances (or extremes!) of East coast climates. I’m already getting complacent about the constant, mildly sunny, room-temperature days of California. How easy one forgets the humidity! I have to say, though, that New England is a wonderful place, weather-wise, if you’re under the age of 10. Children have an appreciation - and an important carelessness about both sweat and snot - of extreme climates that fades with age. It’s possible, I think, to luxuriate in any weather, from screaming through sprinklers to watching spit freeze. I don’t know why it gets more difficult as we grow up.
Aug 1, 2004 at 8:01 pm
Bitching about the weather is a national pastime for Americans, at least — I don’t know about the rest of the world. Early European visitors used to complain about the extremes, so maybe that’s where the tradition started. In fact, early European visitors like Charles Dickens used to complain about everything, so maybe grousing became cool 150 years ago and never went away. Personally, I am so sick of having fans blow at me, I sometimes turn them off and just sit and sweat, but only when I don’t have to interact with people who have a/c ….
Aug 1, 2004 at 8:32 pm
Oh We’ve Got Trouble, Right Here In River City
An untouched-up photo of tonight’s tornado sky, which appeared after a brief period of downpours, and a long few days of crazy, yucky, hot and humid weather. Luckily, the tornadoes never came.
Aug 2, 2004 at 6:04 pm
I’m afraid I’ve become accustomed to the ocean air and lack of humidity; towels that actually dry when you hang them up after a shower; hair that dries before you’ve finished dressing; not having to change twice a day because the air is so saturated with moisture that the gallons of sweat don’t have a place to evaporate to.
Oh, and I don’t miss the mosquitos either.
Aug 9, 2004 at 4:33 pm
Nice to find your site, Lori! Living in Los Angeles does not guarantee access to Mother Nature’s air conditioning. Much of Los Angeles wallows in a basin which traps heat and - yes - moisture beneath a layer of fuel exhaust, heavy metals, and smoke. The humidity rarely reaches the levels I remember from the clammy New England summers of my past. The “Ozone Alert” days in Providence were worse than anything I’ve experienced, but in L.A. one wonders who is responsible for changing the filters on Momma Nature’s air conditioner. Guaranteed relief can only be found on the coast - and you can even sit on the beach without being disturbed. (Although I have been photographed by tourists.)
Aug 11, 2004 at 10:39 pm
Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay in responding to comments: I’m only now catching up from my week of blog-silence!
Tish, we’d love to have you in Keene…but if you come here, can I switch places with you & live in San Francisco for a while? I’m sure there are photo shops where *I* could work, too.
Dave & Siona, I’m so glad to hear you like my new blog-picture: I was getting tired of seeing myself with short hair! We’ll see how long I stick with this hairstyle & photo: so far, so good!
Siona, I’d never thought about the connection between weather and *age*, but you’re right: children might complain about many things, but weather usually isn’t one of them. I say “usually,” though, since I think this is changing as kids become more high-tech & sedentary: on a hot day, I bet a lot of kids would prefer playing video games in an air-conditioned house to playing (and sweating) outside.
Kathleen, although it’s been *warm* the past couple of days, I’m *so* glad the humidity has broken. At least now I’m not lying around the house like a dishrag!
P, your comment about turning the fans *off* reminds me of my experience sitting long retreats in Providence, RI in the summertime…in a polyester meditation robe! After a while you just relax *into* the sensation of being hot & sweaty: it’s somehow more tolerable when you don’t fight it.
Shane, I’ve not spent enough time in LA to say much about “your” weather, but spending a week in San Francisco was enough to make a believer out of me. Hiking in the virtual absence of biting insects was heavenly…although I did learn after hiking an entire day in sandals that putting sunblock on your *feet* is a good idea…
Mumun!!! So great to “see” you here! Ji Hyang’s LA stories have given me the itch to visit you in your neck of the woods…but for now, I’m grounded here in NH. You’re right, though, that city air is always hotter, heavier, and more oppressive than country air: pollution exacerbates heat. But even so, things were mighty steamy there for a while here in NH.