K-Squared Ramblings

Bright Fog

Weird: I had to wear sunglasses while driving through fog. The layer was just thin enough to produce major glare from the sun. #

The Thirteenth

• It’s not off to a great start, but heres hoping today is less frustrating than yesterday. #
• Was hoping for more than 30% chance of rain, esp. the way TV news was going on last night w/LIVE DOPPLER 2000! Where’s that @AlYankovic vid? #
• Appropriate. Today’s Word of the Day is triskaidekaphobia. #
• Slowest Patch Tuesday update ever. ’Course that’s partly because Norton decided to run a full scan DURING the update. #
• Patches did eventually finish, but it took >1.5 hours to install them. Usually if I start it before lunch, it’s done when I get back. #
• Someone searching for “old photos of shoreline village long beach” hit this photo…taken last week. Oops. #

Hail Burst, Pride & Predator, DTV

• Wow…just had a seriously intense burst of hail. ~30 seconds, but LOUD! #
• This looks hilarious: Pride and Predator (via @breagrant) #
• Just remembered it’s Digital TV Switch Day! Or rather, it WAS. Looks like a lot of stations are taking the new June deadline. #

Rain!

Rain! Walked out the door this morning and saw clear blue sky, so I wasn’t convinced… but RAIN! (We seriously need it.) #

*sigh* Google maps informs me that my usual route home is solid red. Rush hour + OMGWTF water from sky! Surface streets it is. #

Moody Weather

Morning: t-shirt, sweater, heavy jacket. Lunchtime: just the t-shirt. Slight difference in temp… #

Hot or Not?

• Switched to long-sleeved shirts & started wearing sweaters this week. And now it’s supposed to break 90 DEGREES today and all weekend. WTF? #
• Must sleep. Saw spam title “Wanna burn movies?” and first reaction was revulsion against gleeful censorship, not “look, more piracy spam.” #

Cross-posted at LiveJournal.

Fall, Spelling, WPA2, Jokes

• Fall in SoCal = checking the weather report daily to decide between shorts or a heavy jacket. #
• I keep seeing pill spam with sensational election-related subjects. Oddly they can spell Obama correctly, but consistently write “McCane” #
• OK, chicken-and-road jokes are old hat, but this set using (mostly political) celebrities is new to me. #
• Time to upgrade your wireless network security to WPA2. #wifi #security #

Cloud Cover-Up

Today was a reminder that just having cloud cover doesn’t necessarily keep things cool. We’ve had occasional wispy clouds at evening, and at one point some serious cloud cover closer to the coast, but today was hazy and overcast all day—and it was just plain muggy.

Eh, it’s only early August. It’ll get hotter (and occasionally muggier).

Clouds on the Horizon

Well, June Gloom seems to be over, and we’re now into the time of year when we get hot, sunny days with lots of clouds. Big, towering cumulus clouds, often with anvil heads, promising shade and rain to cool things down. The teases.

Yeah, we see those clouds most afternoons—on the horizon, just on the other side of the coastal mountains!

While it’s great for summer activities—beach trips, swimming, hiking, etc.—it can also be frustrating when you have to choose between running your electricity-guzzling air conditioner all day or leaving your window open all night. The clouds are right there, taunting you with relief from the heat—relief that will not come.

When I was in high school, my family took a vacation across the Great American Southwest^TM. We went to Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. We drove out to Mesa Verde, which wasn’t a canyon, but there were still a lot of cliffs. We came back through Arizona, where we stopped by Meteor Crater and Sunset Crater. We joked that it was a tour of all the big holes in the ground. (A few years later, I posted some photos from this trip online.)

The weird thing about it was that we went during August, and we got rained on at least briefly almost every afternoon—but only outside of California. Utah? Rain. Arizona? Rain. Colorado? Rain. I don’t think we got rained on during our three hours in Nevada (we stopped at Valley of Fire on the way out), but as I recall, the rain stopped about the time we crossed from Arizona back into California.

We don’t get summer storms much here in SoCal.

June Gloom! Extended Tour!

With luck the people complaining about the “unseasonable” morning cloud cover have all realized we get the same thing every year. Although I don’t think it usually lasts this far into July. We were standing at the America Plaza transfer station on Thursday morning, watching the fog roll in past the buildings at the south end, but by the time we hit the Gaslamp district for lunch, it was all cleared away.

We noticed an interesting coastal climate zone, though. On the trip down Wednesday afternoon, the clouds came in somewhere around Mission Viejo or San Juan Capistrano and stayed locked in all the way through La Jolla. It finally started clearing up just as we were reaching San Diego. Then on the trip back, a bit later in the afternoon on Sunday, the clouds rolled in as we reached La Jolla and didn’t break up until we reached Mission Viejo. We stopped in San Clemente for coffee (it was a long weekend with lots of walking and not much sleep), and the barista asked us if we’d been to Oceanfest, adding that it wasn’t really a good day for it. We explained we were on our way back from San Diego, he asked whether it was better down there, and we told him that it was warm and clear—but only south of La Jolla.

Yes, it does rain in L.A.

An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly enough rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.