The Gods Must Be Pissed Off

A thunderstorm just blew through our area. It dumped a ton of hail out in our yard; it's far too warm and wet for the hail to last very long but it was loud and filled with lightning and thunder, all very impressive. Our dogs, unfortunately, are terrified and are likely to refuse to go outside without human accompaniment for several days. They've been needy and we've allowed them access to our bedroom once the cats are put away in their room; being around the people seems to help them calm down.

During the storm, it occurred to me that thunderstorms must have played a part in the birth of religion. Even to a modern, scientifically literate sophisticate such as myself the storm is a little bit scary -- and I know full well what's going on up there in the sky and why the world is behaving the way it is. A lightning strike can kill a human being, can light a house on fire in an instant. Hailstones can get large enough to draw blood when they strike. For someone with little ability to understand air currents, atmospheric pressure, static electricity, sonic booms, and how hail is formed, the sudden violent insanity of the weather must have been terrifying, confusing, and awe-inspiring.

There are clearly very, very powerful forces at work, and it's hard to avoid describing a thunderstorm without using words alluding to anger and rage. Nature herself is angry. If nature can be angry, then she must be something like a person, to have emotions. Maybe, then, someone can do something to calm her down, make her less angry and less scary. That would seem to be a terribly important thing to do during the chaos, violence, and destruction that a thunderstorm can generate. And it would account for a lot of ancient visions of the gods as temperamental, capricious, destructive, cruel, and judgmental.

Now that we understand what causes thunderstorms, of course, we have no need for myths about thunder-gods. But that doesn't make the thunder any less impressive when you're in the middle of it.

Writing Again

It's been quite a busy time in the real world, a place that I occupy much more often than the intellectually interesting but not-very-interactive land of Law And Policy Blogging.  So before I get into some thoughts about immigration reform, an update for those who care about such things.  Or indeed, I may not jump on immigration reform just yet; it's a complex and ambiguous enough subject that it does not lend itself to a one-off policy rant -- although I'll tell you right now, I'm no moatdigger and cannot imagine how the current policy regime can be feasibly sustained.

Anyway, for weekend guests, baby back ribs turned into pulled pork almost immediately as literally dozens of rib bones simply slid out of sheets of moist, tender, succulent pork and into whiskey-chipotle barbeque sauce served atop creole rice.  The Wife made tequila-lime-chipotle custard to go with it.  My shoulders and back and neck are still aching from breaking through layers of granite and quartz underneath my back yard so that The Wife could have her climbing roses and we could replace a set of fallen Italian cypress trees with a red-leafed plum.  And far too much time was spent today waiting in a doctor's office for a consultation that The Wife was required to attend due to the nature of the visit.*  The weather has turned nice and we're finally starting to get some evenings without gale force winds, so it's possible to spend a good part of the evening outdoors in the newly-reimagined back porch reading or writing.  And reading has been a pleasure, too, since a comment on a blog led me to track down a delicious fantasy novel.  Recreational reading is a pleasant change of pace from history and law.

So maybe I'll give some thought to immigration next.  Or maybe I'll play with The Sims some more.  I'm not dead, just not writing a lot for a while.


*  Warning: Linked cartoon video depicts violence inflicted upon an anthropomorphisized beaver and is in such bad taste as to be unsuitable for viewing by anyone.

Miracles Of Modern Commerce

Grandma only turns 88 years old once in her life.  And she's had a shortage of real, just-for-her, birthday parties.  So The Wife and I got tickets for a weekend trip to Milwaukee, which is why I've not been blogging and instead spending a lot of time in airplanes and with family.  Living my life instead of blogging about it.  Sadly, my neck is still sore.

You know, there's still snow on the ground in Wisconsin?  Dirty, sooty, ugly piles of compacted snow left over from plows and clearing parking lots, mainly, and almost no clean white drifts.  And it's cold there.  Not insufferably cold, but I was glad to have brought my heavy coat and beanie.  And the lake next to my aunt and uncle's house is still frozen over -- over a square mile's worth of frozen lake.  Those are ice drifts, not waves, in the photograph.

And I got reminded, taking this photograph, of what is meant by the joking phrase "frozen tundra" for Wisconsin's environment.  When tundra thaws out, it is a swamp.  Wet, cold, and muddy.  Later in the year, this lakeside location will become a very pleasant place to sit and eat an apple while watching the lake and enjoying the warm Wisconsin summer.  Right now, though, it takes a willingness to get your socks soggy and a tolerance for wind blowing across that ice right in your face, all in the quest for a good shot.

Coming home was a wonderfully pleasant shock.  The Wife and I ate lunch outside in shirt sleeves after our plane landed, with half the clientele at one of my old haunts wearing shorts.  Tonight there was enough light and warmth in the air for us to walk the dogs after dinner.  I'll take California over Wisconsin, thank you very much.

How's The Weather Where You're At?

I mowed the lawn today.  It really needed it since the grass has grown quite long over the past several weeks.

I wore short sleeves and cargo pants when I did it.  I worked up a decent sweat, too.  It's been several hours since I finished and my feet are still unreasonably sore from it.  There were still autumn leaves on the ground, nearly all of which I vaporized with the lawn mower.  The back yard needs another round with the rake, though; the leaves were damper there and did not vanish into dust and fibers so nicely.

I got the job all done before the rain hit and The Wife and I had to make an appearance at a memorial service.  Where I was quite warm in a suit.

Eat your heart out, D.C.  But don't worry -- I'll get my comeuppance in a few weeks when I'm in Milwaukee.

Edwards Air Force Base

It's kind of a shame that when my in-laws come out next month, I won't have the ability to take them out to the base.  Driving out there today for work reminded me that the landscape is pretty extraordinary.  Some days I can see the beauty in the area and some days I can't; today was a good day (in part because it had just rained).  Super-old Joshua trees, expansive lake beds, Martian-looking rock escarpments, weird-shaped buildings where science and aviation type stuff happens, and lots of cool-looking old airplanes on sticks.  My father-in-law would enjoy that but we'll have to make do with civilian-access equivalents elsewhere.

Sandstorm

I awoke today to strong winds in the back yard.  They didn't let up all day.  As I made my way to the court, it looked to me as though it were about to rain, or a fog had set in.  Certainly it was cold enough for a fog.  But it wasn't fog, it was sand from the desert floor thrown across the California countryside by a vicious, angry, frigid wind.  As I waited for my cases to be called I could look out the windows to the dry creek bed, and saw curls of white-brown sand thrown fifty feet into the air, and the mountains -- less than ten miles away -- obscured to invisibility in the violent drabness of the sandy air.  When I left, I had to walk through the dirty gusts, which I was told later were, on occasion, in excess of the posted speed limit for most of our streets.  The grit shot instantly into my mouth and nose, and forced me to shut my eyes, walking nearly blind through the parking lot.  Even in the safety of my car, the cruel wind pushed on me again and again, varying my vehicle's vector to veer as I made my way to the office.

Nature is more powerful than you.

Magic Worked!

I was joking with a friend the other day about magic. It started out with me observing that despite a wet winter and two blasts of snow, we were still in a state of drought.

My friend joked that "sometimes rain dances work; we should do a rain dance!" So we did a couple steps of the "White Boy Shuffle" and poured the remainder of his bottle of water into the ground.

And now, less than a day later, it's raining!

When The Desert Blooms

For about a week every year, California's high desert blooms. This is usually about a month after the rains stop. The grass is green and growing all throughout the desert. Poppies start to emerge. The mountains have a golden-green sheen to them and the yucca plants flower. The weather is short-sleeve pleasant during the day and homeowners contemplate when they'll need to start mowing their lawns.

This is that week. We don't have anything like the glorious crop of poppies we had last year, but when the desert is green it's still quite pretty up here. I can believe it when we come across old documents from when this area was first settled which describe open flowing streams and ponds that lasted all year long, and realize that it made sense back in the day for the first people here to make their living by farming despite the absence of aqueduct.

Next week, of course, all the grass will be dead again, and the blooming yucca trees will be replaced by dead tumbleweeds. But I'm enjoying it all right now.

Good Writing

When the weather starts to turn nice, sitting outside and writing is a very pleasant way to spend a late afternoon. Writers have done this for a long time, but only in the most recent generation have they done so using readily-portable laptop computers. Before that, they had to have written things out longhand.

That must have sucked.

Weather And History

We Americans tend not to think much about the weather. Southern Californians think even less about it. But we often lose sight of how critically important the weather is. Consider:

• About 70,000 years ago, there was a massive volcanic explosion in Indonesia that almost wiped out the entire human race.
• In the early days of the American Revolution, rain and wind on August 27, 1776, and thick fog combined with an unusual northeasterly breeze in the Hudson River channel on the night of August 28-29, 1776 delayed the ability of the British navy to coordinate an attack on the fledgling Continental Army with the redcoats. Had the fog lifted only a few hours earlier, the numerically superior and far better-trained British would surely have stormed Washington's camp, overwhelmed the patriots, and nipped the American Revolution in the bud; America might still be an east-of-the Appalachian province of the British Empire, and George Washington would be mentioned by Her Majesty's subjects with the same tone of voice reserved for Guy Fawkes.
• In 1788, France was struck with two massive hailstorms. Those storms wiped out most of the wheat crop. The result? Mass starvation on top of an already-bankrupt state, which could not buy food to make up for the shortfall. Without those hailstorms, this guy might today be His Most Christian Majesty, King Louis XX of France.
• A drought in 1665 led directly to the Great Fire of London in 1666. Perversely, this was probably good for England because it allowed the city's emerging scientific leaders, men like Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and
• The repeated wind storms and prolonged drought in the southern Midwest of the 1930's created dust storms so vast they blocked out visibility in places like New York and Boston, devastated the agricultural industry of nearly the entire country, likely prolonged the Great Depression by ten years, and spurred on a massive intra-national migration from places like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri to California.
• In the middle of the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan, a successor and descendent of Genghis Khan, would have invaded and likely conquered the islands of Japan had his fleet not been grounded by two successive monsoons.
• The British beat the French at two critical battles -- Agincourt and Waterloo -- because the night before both battles, there were heavy rains that bogged down the heavy French military. At Agincourt, the armored knights were rendered vulnerable to longbow bombardment by thick mud. At Waterloo, Napoleon was delayed in moving his artillery into position by several hours because he had to solve the problem of moving them through the mud, which allowed Wellington time to rendezvous with a Prussian force, giving him a significant numerical advantage that proved decisive.
• The Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BCE would likely have succeeded in conquering everything from Thessalonica to Sparta had the Persian army been able to rendezvous with the navy. As it was, a storm delayed the navy, which got wiped out later by the Athenians, while a Spartan-led coalition fought a delaying action and war of attrition to force the land forces to turn around and go home.
• If Hurricane Katrina hadn't wiped out New Orleans in 2005, who knows? Maybe a significant portion of the American electorate wouldn't have got the idea that the Bush Administration was horribly incompetent and John McCain would be President today.

Why do I mention these interesting historical tidbits about weather? Because California is still in a drought. Everyone is hurting right now, I know. But there are two places in the United States that have been hit particularly hard by the recession. One is Michigan, because it is so heavily dependent on the auto industry. The other in California, because so much paper wealth has evaporated from our real estate.

If we had thriving industries, we might be able to make up for that, but we are in our third consecutive drought year, which disables the single largest industry in the state, which is agriculture -- and which diminishes the value of residential real estate because it threatens to making providing water to all of the homes in California that much more difficult. The agricultural industry is one that can rebound pretty easily -- people have got to eat -- if it gets enough raw material, water in this case, to make its products.

As I learned today, water that falls in the form of rain on the floors of valleys and basins generally is not usable later, so that water is wasted. But rain and especially snow in our mountains is the key to recharging our ground water, our rivers, and our lakes. Without enough rain, we continue our drought conditions, and produce less food and our farmers and agribusinesses make much less money than they would with bountiful harvests.

I'm told that we're in for about two weeks of rain. If that rain turns in to snow in the mountains -- both the San Gabriels and the Santa Susannas down here around Los Angeles and more importantly, along the west face of the Sierra Nevadas -- we might just break the drought and have a normal snowpack. This will water our lawns, mitigate the decline of real estate prices, and reinvigorate our farms. If California can snap out of its recession, this will have a significant bouying effect on the rest of the country -- hell, we Californians might even start buying GM's and Fords again (and start manufacturing some of the parts used to build them again) if we stop losing so many jobs because the agricultural industry starts ramping up and creating wealth once more.

So consider for a moment that all of the talk of stimulus packages and governmental budgets, ajustment to tax rates, and the effect of a new leader on the country and the world, all of that -- it might all be of minute significance as compared with the question of whether the Sierra Nevada Mountains get a good coat of late-winter snow over the next two weeks or whether 2009 will be another drought year for America's largest agricultural production region.

Think snow.

Snow Day

Historically, we get snow here in the desert about every three years. It snowed in the hills yesterday and the day before, but today it has penetrated to the floor of the valley and we're in about three inches right now as I'm waiting to go to lunch. Here's what it looks like outside the office:

For those of you who live in snowy climates (like, say, Tennessee or Wisconsin) this looks like nothing. But bear in mind that this is the desert. Those are Joshua Trees you see in the background with snow on them. This sort of thing is cause for panic. Roads are already shut down and we may have schools closed because of this, too.

LATER: At about 1:00, we realized that a lot of our employees live in outlying areas and needed to get home before chains would be necessary. They beat us to it -- when we got back to the office, it was deserted. The Wife's car wouldn't start, so I went to her work, and we're home now. I got out and shoveled the sidewalk and driveway, but by the time it was done, it didn't seem like I'd done a lot of good. Felt like Tennessee that way. We need to get some rock salt.

Santa Monica

A trip to Santa Monica today was really kind of wasted. All for work. No real chance to enjoy the cool ocean breeze or walk the Promenade or eat at one of the good restaurants. No fun at all. Just drive down there, defend the deposition, drive the client back up to the desert.

When we lived by the beach, we didn't go to the beach a whole lot. But I liked having it there. I could go if I wanted to. And it brought in the weather from the ocean. Since that is gone from my life for the most part, I miss it.

The Wife isn't fond of places like Santa Monica -- not that she doesn't like fun, but she thinks they're cold all the time. She dislikes the fog. I like the fog. I like the cool and the smell of salt in the air. But I'd rather have The Wife.

Texas Doesn't Like Ike

But Houston will not suffer the same fate as New Orleans did during Katrina. There is no lake above Houston kept in place only by earthen levees. It's also a much bigger city, more spread-out than relatively compact New Orleans. But Galveston really has to worry -- Galveston is built on a barrier island and will take the full brunt of the storm surge and a direct hit by the storm just as it comes off the water. Landfall is predicted for about 1:00 a.m. Friday morning, local time. Good luck, Texans.

Speaking of whom, the Houston Texans host a home game against Baltimore Sunday. Shouldn't the game be, you know, moved elsewhere because it's going to happen two days after a Category 4 hurricane goes through the damn city?

Vermillion Sunset

The fires that seem to be consuming all of California and draping our fine desert valley in a melancholy layer of gray haze do bring one thing of note -- spectacular sunsets. Less so the sunrises; the smoke dissipates out over the desert. But to the west, where more fires are resident, the smoke filters out some of the harsher light and leaves a brilliant, ruby color to the orb of the sun surrounded by a copper haze. Sadly, this spectacular display lasts only a half hour or so and then is replaced by the same gray haze as before, only a little bit darker.

Sitting Outside

The Wife was watching a TV show on her computer, and the volume was really loud. With lots of people shouting. And I just wanted to go out and write, and think about my presentation Wednesday, and so I took the computer outside to the back patio. Here I sit, under the paper lanterns on our new chaise lounges, in temperatures in the mid 60's, typing and blogging and enjoying the fresh air all the while. That, and watching the dogs wrestle with each other out on the lawn. They've been begging for treats since I got home from work and started writing, but it's not time yet.

When there's no traffic, I can hear the frogs croaking and owls chirping. When there is traffic, yeah, that's a little bit annoying, but I can generally deal. And there's this yappy little snack dog across the street that offers its opinion on things from time to time. Sassafrass gets excited and runs around whenever she hears the dog yap. It smells nice, too. There isn't that much wind and there isn't that much smog. The air smells clean, and I like it. And right now, no plants seem to be shedding pollen, so I'm not suffering from any kind of allergy outburst.

A very pleasant night.

The Wife thinks it's too damn cold to sit outside for any reason, but I'm glad I ignored her. After putting in all that work on making our back yard nice, and even buying the house based on the strength of the nice back yard, I'm going to enjoy it now that the weather is turning nice. Spring doesn't last real long here in the desert, and it's starting to turn in to summer, so if I'm going to enjoy being outside, now is the time to do it.

Springtime Food

With the weather here in California's High Desert at about its peak, we've have a number of goodies recently.

One goodie has been the long and extraordinary poppy season. Entire hillsides are painted golden orange with California's state flower. In addition to the orange poppies, there are swaths of fields with purple lupins and yellow forget-me-nots, and now we have pale yellow daisies coming in all over, too. Not all the green has gone away from the field grasses, either. I grew up here, and I've only rarely seen the desert this colorful.

Our next-door neighbors invited us to a get-together last night. They grilled up bratwurst (fatty pieces of melty, meaty heaven, bratwurst is) and made Korean fried rice and a spicy garden salad. Some friends brought over sweet baked beans and I made my version of German potato salad:

5 lbs red potatoes
2 bunches green onions
powdered garlic
16 oz. apple cider vinegar
4 oz. bacon
black pepper
sea salt
cayenne pepper, dash
1 tsp. mustard seed
1/2 tsp. coriander
1/4 tsp. carraway seed
3-4 cubes chicken bullion

Dice the green onions, reserving the stems. Quarter the potatoes. Boil the potatoes in brine made of sea salt, green onion stems, chicken bullion and some powdered garlic. You can't boil them for too long. Meanwhile, dice and fry up the bacon, crumble it after draining excess fat. Also, grind up mustard seed, coriander, and carraway seed with mortar and pestle into a fine powder. Combine spice mix with more powdered garlic and small amounts of salt and pepper; add to apple cider vinegar along with bacon and diced onions. When potatoes are thoroughly cooked, remove from brine and place in large mixing bowl. Fold vinegar dressing in to potato mixture, allow to sit for about 1 hour. Serve warm.

Most people marvel at the idea that you can have potato salad without mayonnaise. And yes, mayonnaise makes a good binder. But this uses the potatoes themselves to bind it all together; as you fold the dressing into the potatoes, some of the potatoes will crumble into their starchy goodness and absorb the dressing, binding the various pieces of soft, boiled potato together. And if the salad had mayonnaise, that would be a French potato salad, now, wouldn't it?

The Wife prepared peanut butter creme bars. She didn't like how the crust turned out, though, and wouldn't serve them. I don't know exactly the way she did it, but the creme itself was rich and delicious. She combined sweetened condensed milk with peanut butter, along with some sugar and butter. It seemed to take her quite a bit of labor, but she mixed it all together while cold. In the bars, she added peanut butter and chocolate chips (come on, this is my wife we're talking about, there had to be chocolate involved somewhere). The crust was a crumble of peanuts and flour, and the bottom layer of that came out too tough for her liking. But the creme inside was marvelous and I hope she makes it again sometime, maybe this time in a pie. I'm eating some of the creme along with the top layer of the crumble now with a bit of ice cream, and it's really tasty. Yeah, the bottom layer is a little tough but I scooped out the good stuff from the top (she no longer cares about how it looks) so I've got only the good stuff.

I also made margarita shrimp alfredo tonight. As is my wont, I made too much, but this would probably be enough for a dinner for four:

1 lb. 30-40 count shrimp, peeled and deveined
spaghetti or linguine
8 oz. milk
3 tbsp. flour
1 tbsp. butter
6 oz. white cheese (I used farmer's cheese)
lemon zest
black pepper
sea salt
tequila
limes
Grand Mariner
2 cloves garlic
cayenne pepper

Rinse shrimp in fresh water and marinate in tequila, a dash of lime juice, garlic, and cayenne pepper for at least 15 minutes. Prepare a bechamel with milk and flour, add garlic, pepper, salt, and lemon zest. Simmer to a near-boil. Add butter and cheese, keep at simmer until ready to serve. Boil pasta until al dente.* Sautée shrimp in its tequila marinade, draining off excess liquid when shrimp are cooked through. Add a dash of Grand Marnier and flambé for 5 seconds or so. Combine pasta, sauce, and shrimp, tossing well.

Very rich, but tasty. If you pick a mild enough cheese, the margarita taste in the shrimp should be apparent. If the cheese sauce seems a bit much, try it with olive oil and let me know how that works out for you (I considered that myself tonight but needed to use the cheese for something).

I don't know what my neighbor put in her green salad (some kind of Korean chili powder, I'm sure) but it was great. It came dressed in a light rice vinegar and the cucumbers were a good cooling contrast to the spice. I've been enjoying that, too. And I like baked beans just fine, and they like me, although I have to admit that The Wife doesn't like me when I like baked beans. So the long days are still a novelty, the baseball season is young and my Dodgers haven't broken my heart yet, the poppies are in bloom, and we're awash in good food. Despite the sorry state of our national politics (and really, even that isn't all that bad) there is yet much right with the world.

* For crying out loud, don't overcook your pasta with this or any other recipe. It gets mushy and loses all its taste. Too many people overcook their pasta, some because they may never had had it properly-cooked. You'll like pasta much better if you pay attention and stir it while it's boiling. Don't TXT YR BFF or watch television while you're cooking pasta. Yes, this means that you'll have to stand over a hot stove. For about ten minutes, which is not too much to endure for good pasta. Salt the water generously and bring it to a roaring boil before adding the pasta. After about five minutes, start taking out small bits of pasta and eating them. Don't throw them up against the wall, that's declassé. Eat them and yes, they will be quite hot. If it is crunchy, it isn't done enough yet. The first time you take out a piece that feels tender all the way through, that means that all of the pasta is done, so take out of the water right now. Don't rinse your pasta before adding the sauce, either. It makes the pasta cold and with most sauces, lowers adherence and therefore flavor.

Look, Honey, We're Suburbanites Again!

Happily, the replacement lawn mower worked. By the time I got to the front lawn yesterday, most of the grass was a good nine inches tall and some of the neighbors were no doubt wondering if we'd abandoned the house. (In this market, that's a serious concern.) This makes working a low-horsepower lawnmower something of a challenge (the tall grass does, not my neighbors' concerns). But it got done. And the back yard did today, after we came back from a Freudian Movie Club (today's selection: The Player, which was actually somewhat short on overarching Freudian themes, in my estimation, but certainly a movie worthy of some thought from a storytelling perspective). And The Wife and I had an Easter Egg hunt (we took turns hidings goodies for one another in the kitchen). Later this evening, we'll sit out in our back yard and enjoy the nice, windless day and freshly-mowed lawn, and maybe spend a little time visiting with our neighbors. It's suburban weekend paradise.

Dogs Are Barking

"Let's go walk to McDonald's and get sundaes." Thus did The Wife proposition me early this afternoon. You can address the cognitive dissonance of a walk to McDonald's to get ice cream as a form of exercise at your leisure. We're hardly the first to get to that place.

Yesterday we'd walked to the Almond Blossom Festival, which was a nice little neighborhood event for springtime. A few midway rides and carnival games, some fundraising food booths, arts and crafts vendors, and some live music -- a good time and a very cool thing for a small neighborhood to have. I'd found the weather surprisingly pleasant, if a bit windy, and left my sweatshirt at home. (The Wife, perpetually cold, wore at least three layers of clothing and never took any off.) So the prospect of a longer walk in the nice weekend weather -- it was much less windy today than yesterday -- won me over.

We brought the dogs along, too. They wanted to go for a walk, but they didn't know what they were in for. I mapped it out on Google Earth. As it turns out, our route to the McDonald's was just under 2.5 miles and our route home was just over 2.5 miles; our total trip is close enough to five miles that the tens-of-feet margin of error inherent in using a tool like that won't really matter.

So was this a net gain or loss of calories? This resource says that a slow walk -- and we were pretty slow, with the doggies and all -- one burns .027 calories per pound, per minute of walking. Since we know we walked 5 miles, we can know the amount of time that took. At 3 miles an hour, it would take one hour and forty minutes to walk five miles. So that would be 2.7 calories per pound of body weight. This resource says that a McDonald's hot fudge sundae has 330 calories. Since both of these resources are on the internet, I know they're true and accurate. Therefore, if you weigh 123 pounds or less, a five-mile walk to get a hot fudge sundae at McDonald's is a net calorie gain; if you weigh more, it's a net calorie loss. I decline to publish exactly how overweight I am, but suffice to say that yes, I burned more calories than I consumed with this version of lunch.

My feet are certainly feeling it -- five miles is longer than I'm used to walking. And the doggies are sacked out. They didn't fight very much when I trimmed their claws after the walk -- they just didn't have the energy.

But hey, it was a glorious day. I even sat outside after we got back to read my book on our back porch while there was still daylight (which is now a little while longer, thanks to Daylight Savings Time). And I think I'll sleep very well tonight myself. This counts as a good idea from The Wife, even if I am a bit sore.

Wind Causes Blackout

We lost power today at about 10:30 and didn't get it back for about two hours. In Tennessee, that would have most likely been because of a rainstorm downing a power line. Alternatively, it would have been caused by some dummy hitting something with his car. Here, the vehicular accident is still a possibility, but considering that we were enduring more gale-force winds, it's possible the wind simply blew down a power line unassisted by the force and weight of water along with the wind.

On a related note, a tree got pushed over in the side yard, probably in the last storm, and when the wind calms down we'll have to figure out how to pull it upright again or it will start growing at an angle and that could hurt our wall and the room of the house. I hope we can save the tree; maybe the way to go is to saturate the ground again before pulling the tree back up. Any suggestions, horticulurists?

More Accurate Reporting, Meaning, Reporting That's More Accurate

The local paper reports 1.12 inches of water over the weekend in my neck of the woods. Also, 67 mile-an-hour winds seem about right for what we experienced at Soffit House. This morning driving to work, I saw snow almost down to the aqueduct, which is just under 3,000 feet in our area. The result of a cold, windy storm Sunday night was a glorious view this morning – to the north, I could see Sorrell Peak, the southernmost of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, covered in snow. Usually the Sierras are obscured by haze and distance – Sorrell Peak is about fifty miles from my house, so seeing that far implicates the curvature of the Earth as well as visibility issues. The San Gabriels to the south were still covered by clouds and fog, but I’m sure they’ve got lots of snow, too. Ah, but it’s going to dry out now. I’ll have to turn the lawn sprinklers back on.