San Mateo – Page 2 – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

It’s that time of year

Five minutes ago, Carol was sitting in the living room staring at her laptop, and I was in the kitchen reading a murder mystery. Suddenly my ears caught the sound of something outside the window. I stopped to listen, and it came again.

“Hear the owl?” I said to Carol.

“No,” she said. “Where?”

I opened one of the kitchen windows a crack, and we stood there and listened.

“Hu-hu, hu, hu,” said the owl in a nearby tree.

Carol and I grinned at each other. This is one of those times when we really like living in a cemetery. “Great Horned Owl,” I said.

“Hu-hu, hu-hu.” It’s mating season.

Yammer yammer

As I walked over to the science fiction section in the library, I could hear a resonant baritone voice in a far corner. Some idiot on their cell phone, I muttered under my breath. Let’s see, McCaffrey, nope further back, LeGuin, getting closer.

Yammer, yammer, yammer, said the resonant baritone voice, distracting me. Yammer yammer yammer.

Laidlaw, Laidlaw, Laidlaw, I repeated to myself, looking through the Ls. What, no Marc Laidlaw? Rats. OK, let’s try S.

yammer yammer give me seed money yammer yammer I’d be CTO yammer

I tried to shut the phone conversation out of my mind, but it was so full of Silicon Valley cliches that it leaked past my defenses. And every other word seems to be “I” or “me,” I said under my breath. I walked around the corner to get to the Ss, and there he was: a young white male, schlubbily dressed. I ignored him as best I could and looked for Stross, but the book I was looking for wasn’t there. Let’s try Matthew Hughes.

yammer what I want yammer I told the VC yammer I said I don’t let people quit my company yammer

The Hs were just around the corner from where the young man was talking. It took some effort to shut the loud self-important voice out of my head. No Hughes on the shelf, but I got distracted by an old Harry Harrison novel. Though I studiously paid no attention, I could sense the young man’s back looking at me with annoyance; I had entered his private space. He walked away, still talking loudly, his self-important voice fading to a distant but resonant whine.

The Harrison novel was not nearly as good as I remembered, so I left it on the shelf and went to look for Pratchett. It occurred to me that the young man with the self-important loud voice was very much like a character from a Terry Pratchett novel: one of those self-involved narrow characters who is certain he is saving the world (from something it doesn’t need saving from) and who is bewildered when he makes a giant mess out of everything.

May the gods preserve us from such people, I muttered to myself as I checked out my books, and then realized I was talking to myself a bit too much. Not a good sign.

Smoke

We were awakened Sunday night by the smell of smoke. We got up in the dark and tried to figure out where the smell was coming from. Maybe the neighbors left a fire burning in their fireplace overnight, and the slight breeze was blowing it into our house? When we got up on Monday morning, we read that thousands of acres were burning about 70 miles north of us; we had smelled the smoke from those fires.

The wind shifted yesterday and the air cleared, but today the smoke returned. It appeared to be an overcast day, but it was smoke, not clouds, blocking the sun. Over in the East Bay, Ms. M.’s spouse saw ash falling out of the sky in Oakland. I stayed indoors with the windows closed.

In the afternoon, Carol found an apartment for us to look at over in Half Moon Bay. We drove up Highway 92 into the hills west of San Mateo. The smoke reduced visibility so that from the flats where we started out, the tops of the hills looked blue and misty.

In Half Moon Bay the air smelled clean; the line of hills to the east, and an onshore breeze, kept the smoke away. But we could see the smoke above us, a wide plume about a thousand feet up. As the sun got low in the sky, the plume of smoke turned it into a lurid red glowing ball, like a huge red traffic light in the sky.

Heat and smoke

The temperature reached 104 degrees at San Francisco airport this afternoon, which is about 6 miles from our house.

We drove to Berkeley to see my cousin, and when we got to the Bay Bridge, you could barely across San Francisco Bay because of the smoke that has drifted down from the wildfires burning to the north.

More heat and smoke forecast for tomorrow.

Now I know perfectly well that climate change cannot be traced in short-term weather patterns: climate change is traced through analysis of wider trends, which is what makes it so difficult for human beings to understand. And I know perfectly well that just because we have extreme heat today, and Europe had extreme heat a couple of weeks ago, and there are forest fires raging across the Pacific Northwest because of hot and dry conditions up there, and a devastating hurricane swept through Houston — I know perfectly well that these things, by themselves, do not indicate that climate change is getting worse.

But I can say, with some accuracy: Guess we’d better get used to heat and smoke (and hurricanes, and…), because we’re just going to have more of them.

View from the kitchen window

San Mateo, Calif.

We had planned to leave San Mateo at noon. Now it is half past twelve, and we still haven’t finished loading the car with clothes, camping gear, ham radio gear, jars of plum jam, and Lord knows what else.

Even though we got up at 6:30 this morning, we just had too much to do. Carol and I spent the last two weeks running an ecology camp, and that left us little time to get ready for our trip.

So here we are, still in San Mateo. We hope to get on the road by one o’clock. We hope….

New potatoes

BlogApr16161

We obviously didn’t harvest all our potatoes last year, because potato plants started sprouting in the garden in February. Carol wanted to plant pole bean seedlings in that part of the garden, so she dug up the potatoes and got three or four pounds of lovely little Yukon Gold potatoes. We made coconut milk curry.

In the clouds

We decided to go for a hike up in the redwoods late this afternoon. As we drove up into the hills, we got closer and closer to the clouds, until finally we were in them. The trail started close to two thousand feet above sea level, then wound down the coast side of the hills. The clouds were blowing in from the ocean against the hills, so we were in the clouds all the way down to where we turned around, at about twelve hundred feet elevation. In fact, the clouds (or was if fog?) got thicker the lower we got.

It continues to amaze me that we can start driving from downtown San Mateo, in the city a mile from the bay at maybe twenty feet about sea level, and in twenty minutes we can be hiking in the mountains among Douglass fir and redwoods two thousand feet above sea level. This is one of the benefits of living in a seismically active region: mountains right next to the ocean.