Clouds! (It's Been Rainy In LA)

 I was out in the car yesterday when it started raining so hard I had the windshield wipers to the fastest speed and I still had trouble seeing through the wet on the windshield.  

Sun did make cameo appearances throughout the day.  

Today it was sunny when I got up - though there were lots of exciting clouds, ranging from white to almost black.  

This iris opened since yesterday and the sun seemed like a good opportunity to get on my bike  for a ride along the beach.  

This is the last block on Rose Ave as you get to the beach in Venice.  The border between Los Angeles (Venice is a neighborhood in LA) and Santa Monica is about a block to the north (to the right in the picture).

Parts - not many - of the bike trail had a couple of inches of water and some sand.  

Headed north, Santa Monica pier is up ahead. 

There are a few wooden walkways from the bike trail to near the water.  I wanted some pictures from near the water.  Above I'm looking north.

Below I'm looking west. 

And below I'm looking south back toward the pier.  This is NOT a black and white photo.

It was at this point, as I was picking my bike up out of the sand, that a life guard in a truck came over to me and said that NOAA reported there was a thunderstorm due in the next half hour and to clear the beach.  (There weren't that many people out anyway, only a few down by the water.)

At this point I felt the first rain drops.  The temperature was in the low to mid 60s F and felt warmer when the sun was on me.  

As I rode back, the palm trees along the palisade in downtown Santa Monica were nicely silhouetted.  

And below I'm approaching the Santa Monica pier from the north.  I hadn't seen the ferris wheel turning when I passed by the first time and it certainly wasn't moving now.  Nor did I see any action on the roller coaster.  

It never rained too hard, despite the ominous clouds.  Some blue and some hint of sun if not actual sun were always visible.  

On the way home I stopped at the 99 Cents store.  But most of the shelves were empty. The cashier said January 5 would be their last day.  They did have produce.  Two avocados, an artichoke, and some broccoli cost me $2.  

When I got near home, it wasn't raining, but there was water gushing down the hill to the flat area.  It had rained very hard while I was gone, but not where I was.  Later my granddaughter took this picture when it rained heavily again and you can see some of the rain coming down, though the picture doesn't capture how hard it was raining.  

The rain seems to have fallen here and there over short periods of time as clouds moved through.  The following list shows rainfall in inches as of 7am Thursday for the five days prior.  There's a lot of variation and this doesn't count what fell yesterday and today.  

Oxnard 6.13

Porter Ranch 4.82

Culver City 3.43

Westlake Village 3.31

Downtown LA 1.98

Bel Air 3.27

Long Beach 1.24

Van Nuys 4.30

Santa Monica 1.80

Northridge 4.54

Whittier 1.51

Pasadena 1.61

Castaic 2.53

I found different numbers when I googled Los Angeles annual rainfall. (Some variation is surely due to location.)  But the range was between 12 and 14 inches!

This is all a reminder that the earth itself is doing fine.  The changes brought on by climate change, the loss of species, are irrelevant to Nature.  The landforms and oceans will survive and evolve without us.  

The coming climate catastrophes are only catastrophes in the eyes of humans.  I'm not sure what the animal and plant species that are being threatened know or feel.  The earth has experienced many changes over its billions of years.  Our hominid ancestors only appeared around seven million years ago.  And individual human lives are like flashes of lightening (which I never did see today) in comparison.   

So go out into nature and learn.  

Panhandling, Inflation, Clouds

 Despite three different topics in the title, this isn't going to be a long post.

1.  It's ok for firefighters, but not for the hungry

Lake Otis and Tudor is one of the busiest intersections in the city.  I also have to get across it on a couple of my regular bike rides.  

Two weeks ago it was crawling with firefighters raising money for charity.  Though collecting money in Firefighters' boots seems a little gross.  They didn't look like new, unused boots.  

That's an admirable activity.  But they were doing it standing in the intersection.  Some in the middle, others between the right turn lanes and the through traffic lanes.  

Photo by ADN photographer Marc Lester

Eighteen months ago, signs like this caused a stir in Anchorage.  

The ADN article tells us:

"The municipality spent more than $8,000 to post anti-panhandling signs at dozens of Anchorage’s busiest intersections in December — but the city law cited on the sign was found unconstitutional by a state court years ago."

"Corey Young, a spokesman for Mayor Dave Bronson, said the signs are meant to 'keep pedestrians away from dangerous situations in the roadway.'” 

It appears from the article that this was done by the mayor's office without consulting affected  departments like the Police Department.  I don't think anyone disputes the idea that there's an element of danger involved in walking the lines of cars at busy intersections, but the courts had said it couldn't be prohibited. 

If the mayor's office thinks this is dangerous, why are they letting the Fire Department do this?  Did the mayor's office even know the Fire Department was doing this?  

Or maybe we should ask if the original signs were an attempt to make those experiencing homelessness less visible to the general public, and danger wasn't the real issue.  

2.  Who's responsible for inflation

I like seaweed.  I don't eat it everyday, but I do now and then.  Last week I went to the Korean grocery story on Fireweed and Eagle to get some more seaweed.  Here's last year's empty package.

And the new one I got last week.  

The weight and number of servings are both the same.  It's at least a year since I bought the first package of seaweed there.  But the price of both is still the same!  

While national chain groceries have been rapidly raising their prices, this local Korean grocery is charging the same amount as they did a year ago - $9.99.  A similar product at Carr's, for instance, is advertised:

This is a total of .92 ounces for $8.99.   The Korean store seaweed is 65 servings at .07 ounces per serving, or 4.55 ounces!  One is $9.77 per ounce  and the other is $2.20 per ounce.

But my point isn't that you can get seaweed much cheaper at the local Korean grocery than at the chain store.  

It's really about inflation.  We know prices have gone up rapidly in the chain store groceries.  But on this item, the Korean grocery has kept the price the same for over a year.  No blaming inflation to raise the price, and adding further to inflation.  [But it's true that I don't know how much the Gimme packages were selling for a year ago.  It's possible that no one increased the price of seaweed.]

3.  Clouds

Anchorage has been having weather this month.  By that I mean wind and rain and sun all fighting it out.  I put up some cloud pictures two weeks ago.  Here are from one this week's bike rides.

Same corner as top pic but with little traffic and no fire department panhandlers. 

Taku Lake

4.  Biking.  And since I've mentioned bike rides, I reached my 1000 km goal for the summer (since April) and then got to 1100.  Getting most of my rides done on the local bike trails and getting regular views of places like Taku Lake make the riding a pleasure.  For lots of folks 600 miles is not that much, but it's kept me out exercising regularly all summer.  

The Wind And Clouds Fight It Out In And Over Anchorage

 

Anchorage doesn't have a lot of what I'd call 'weather.'  By that I mean that generally things a relatively calm.  It rains, but not too hard.  Snow falls quietly.  In the Anchorage bowl the wind generally is a light breeze at most.  We almost never have thunderstorms.  No tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards.  

But this week we are a weather battleground.  The first several pictures are from my Tuesday bike ride.  It wasn't particularly windy on the ground, but clouds were moving furiously, seemingly trying to cover up the blue and block the sun.  Was I going to get my bike ride down before it started raining?  (I did.)

It rained Thursday morning and I assumed that I'd be driving to Grow North Farm for the weekly vegetable pickup, but the sun came out about 2pm.  So did the wind.  Here are the trees in the backyard in the wind.

But the sky looked blue enough, the clouds not too threatening, that I biked to get the veggies.  It wasn't bad most of the time.  Lots of tree debris on the trails, but basically little stuff.  

On the way back, as I was about to cross the Glenn Highway, it looked like there was rain coming down to the west (I didn't quite catch gray curtain in the photo),

 but to the east, the sun was dappling the Chugach range.  

This morning it's both cloudy and quite windy again.  It rained a bit, but not now.  But I want to get this up before the power goes out.   

Moose Loopish

 A friend told me the other day that he averaged 60 miles or so per day over 13 days in France on his bike this summer.  I've been doing much shorter rides.  But he got me thinking I should do the Moose Loop - a loop along the Anchorage bike trails that remembers, physically, the outline of a moose's head. Most of it is on trails but there is still a gap between the end of Campbell Creek trail and the Kincaid trail.  It's about 32 miles altogether if you do the northern loop.  

Point White Pier

 I went along with my daughter as she ran errands around the island.  The last one was near Point White Pier.  The sun was below the hills and the light was magical.  The clouds were moving and the water was moving and there was a kaleidoscope effect on the water.  

I saved this picture with higher resolution so you could enlarge it to better see the king fisher sitting on the adjacent dock.  

Here's looking down at the rocks through the water below the pier.  

Tomatoes And Other Odds And Ends

Red tree and clouds.  A bit of urban natural beauty.  

Here are some of the tomato seedlings last April 20.  Tomatoes don't do well in Alaska.  It has to stay above 50˚F (10˚C) at night for them to bear fruit.  But I found a sub-arctic variety that was supposed to bear down to 40˚F.  I left some inside by a south facing window, put some in the greenhouse in the backyard, and left one outside.  The one outside had the strongest plant - it had a sturdy stem, didn't get all leggy, and had lots of flowers and a dozen or more little tomatoes.  The ones inside (the house and the backyard greenhouse) also did well, but were not very strong.  They grew much taller and needed lots of stakes to keep them from falling over, or worse, breaking.  But we have been getting cherry size tomatoes since early September.  But then I decided I needed to bring them in when we had snow warnings.  So here are some I picked the other day.  Some are the smallest tomatoes I've ever seen - pea size.  

I enjoyed my tomato plants this summer, but it also proved my basic sense of tomatoes in Alaska - they aren't worth the effort.  I'd rather spend the time of plants that reward more spectacularly without all the work.  I still have some plants inside by the windows with small green marbles and lots of yellow flowers.  Let's see how many tomatoes we end up with.  I'd say we've had maybe 20, but not a lot in total volume.  

So when I made a couple of breads yesterday - the sour dough starter wants me to use it at least every two weeks - I made one rosemary/olive bread and one tomato/basil.  One gets eaten right away, the other goes in the freezer.  I wanted to try the tomato bread since I've never made one before, but I sliced the wrong one, so I'll have to wait a week to learn how it came out. 

 I really wanted to get the shiny asphalt covered apparatus at the back of this truck, but I was on my bike and he was moving.  But I had to settle for the wet new layer in the street.  

I decided I would like a wall with this wall paper in one room

A Cloud Break

Sun finally came out late this afternoon.  I've been on the laptop way too long.  So I got in another bike ride.  But I quickly realized the sun might be short lived.   Those clouds surely had a lot of water in them.  

Just about halfway and I passed through a tour group getting prepared to return south.

On the way back the clouds was even more ominous.   It started raining.  Not too hard.   I was briefly back in the sun, but couldn't find a rainbow.  

And it was sunny again when I got home.  I'm 11 kilometers closer to Bangkok.  17 km to Ayutthaya and then 30 more to Bangkok.  To understand these last travel reference see this post from May this year when I started this bike 'tour.'

Some Nice Stuff For A Break - Clouds, Sunflowers, And The Power Of Teachers

First, here's the view I saw at Goose Lake yesterday.  Clouds can be so amazingly beautiful.  

And sunflowers at UAA.  

My own sunflowers - planted from seed - are just now budding.  There is time for them to bloom still!  (I'm trying to put this on the right and have the text on the left, but Blogger has created a new "improved" version and I haven't figured out how to align the pictures and text the way I want them.)

And finally, I found this AOC twitter thread truly endearing.  

pic.twitter.com/eUhZ3P21uR

— Alberto Cairo (@AlbertoCairo) August 13, 2020

{If it's too small to read, click on it.  It will take you to the Twitter post.  Then click on the image again and it will let you see each of the four tweets enlarged.]

This young member of Congress is so intelligent and so creative!! And then you look at the old men in power and scratch your head.  If more people with the energy, decency, intelligence, and imagination were in Congress, we could have such an incredible country.  My only hope is that when the people of AOC's age now gain power in Congress is that they won't have been worn down by the tedium of fighting entrenched power.  But meanwhile this exchange with her 2nd Grade teacher is priceless.  

Keeping Busy - The Bike, The Yard, The Granddaughter, And The Spanish Lessons

When I'm not posting about COVID-19, I'm doing other things.

There's bike rides.  Here are a couple of mergansers at the lake at the Alaska Native Medical Center.  I thought they were building a nest, but it wasn't there when I went by a few days later.

Sweeping from the deck the catkins from (I think) the aspens and the leaf bud scales from the cottonwood trees two or three times a day.  

The leaf bud scales are particularly pesky because they stick to the bottom of your shoe.  

But after reading The Overstory I think about them very differently.  In one sense they are a form of tree communication.  I'm still struggling with that concept.  Whether it's intentional or not, the catkins and the leaf bud scales are a signal to other plants and creatures.  Who reads the message and how it affects their behavior I have no idea.  At the very least it's like a seasonal clock.  And these add to the pile of organic material that feed the trees that drop them as well as other trees.  When the cottonwood cotton falls, it's

another story for me.  I'm not interested in letting them spread their seeds all over the yard, so I'll try to collect them and get rid of them.  I still think there are potential uses for the cotton, but I'm not the person who is going to exploit them.

I am, on the other hand, exploiting the dandelion leaves to cook up in my frittatas.  They're full of vitamins and there are no other greens I can get as fresh. 

I've finally attacked the Cateye Micro Wireless my wife gave me last year.  And I know why it's taken me so long.  I've figured out how to get it on the bike, but it's not sending the signal from the spinning wheel to report speed and distance.  Did I put it on wrong?  I don't think so.  Maybe the battery in the sensor isn't working.  I can switch the one from the computer that reads it to see if it works on the computer.  And then there are these instructions.  The editing on my iPhoto doesn't 'stick' so even though I turned it right side up, it still came out sideways.  There are things that you fix and then the problem is solved.  And there are things you try to fix and they keep spawning new problems.  And during a pandemic I'm not willing to go to the bike shop to ask for help.  

The bleeding hearts are up and unfolding.  You can't really say they are budding, because they are out, but they aren't quite yet into their full display.  

And then there are the wonderful chat messages my granddaughter sends me when we zoom.

And I do a daily 20-30 minutes of Duolingo Spanish.  If I ever get out to a Spanish speaking country again, I won't be as tongue-tied as last time.  It's a reasonably good program, free, and it has lots of positive reinforcement sounds.

If you click on these images they get bigger and easier to read

You have some really simple questions where you pick the write word of three choices.  They even have pictures so it's hard to get them wrong.  Others you fill in the blank with one word.  Then there are those where you translate from Spanish to English.  The one above I had to translate from English to Spanish.  If you get it right, the message on the bottom is in green.  But if you get it wrong it's in read with the right answer.

The hardest ones are when you have to listen to someone saying the sentence and you have to write what you hear.

The big blue speaker says it the way someone would actually say it.  Often this is impossible for me to understand.  But I know in English we also don't pronounce things quite as they are written, or we mumble over syllables.  I'm getting better at hearing what they are saying.  If you can't understand it, the turtle button says it slowly, word for word.  

On the bottom you can report a problem - "I think I should have gotten credit for that one" for example.  Sometimes they seem overly picky about how you write something in English.  The Discuss option lets you see what other learners are saying.  There are native Spanish speakers which is helpful explaining why it's one way or another.  Or advanced learners who might link to a site that explains the difference between two words, or a grammar explanation.   

I've committed to do 20 points worth a day. That's roughly two lessons.  They keep track.  I'm up to about 70 days in a row.  I was up to 190 days in a row, but when we traveled back to Anchorage at the beginning of March I missed two days.  You can buy (with rewards you get as you go along) 'get out of jail free' cards - in this case, if you miss a day you can use your card to keep your streak.  That's the only way I could have had such a long streak.  But this time I missed two days and had to start over again.