Thoughts on Arriving

So we've been "home" for about two weeks now (staying in a hotel for the first ten days doesn't count), and we just about have everything situated in the house.  The kitchen was the first room to be settled.  The guest bedroom is all set up! (Book your vacations now!) The office is almost ready.  The bathrooms done. Our closet still needs some organizing, and everything could use a good vacuuming.  Pretty much everything has found its space  Even though it's remarkably foreign - more than one might expect - it's becoming more like home every day.  Now that the house is more or less under control, it's time to get out and start exploring.  Because until I find a job, my world is incredibly tiny!  

We've been to O'ahu several times, but upon arrival, nothing seemed terrifically familiar.  Partly because my husband usually does the driving when we're here, partly because this has never been my favorite island and we usually just connected here before dashing off to a different island, partly because the roads here are pretty confusing (to say nothing of the street names in a foreign language!), and partly because it's all colored by the we-live-here-now filter.  We're not vacationers, we're residents.  And that changes everything.

A couple people told me, before we left, to beware of island fever - when you just have to get off the island and start to go a little stir crazy.  We spent seven years in central FL, roughly the same land mass and population as here, and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of all the things to do and see there.  Never even made it to Sea World or Gator Land (gasp!).  So, to the island-fever folks, if you have run out of things to do on a gorgeous tropical island of a million people, clearly you are not looking hard enough.

When I'm not arranging the house1, I've been doing loads of comparison-shopping.  Trying to figure out what reasonable prices are for things around here (e.g. where milk does not cost $7 a gallon or other confiscatory pricing), and I'm surprised to see that gas pricing is virtually uniform throughout the island, even right at the airport.  I meant to take a photo of "what $100 buys in Hawaii" upon return from shopping yesterday afternoon, but already put the perishables in the fridge before I thought to - and didn't want to pull it back out.  So, some other time.

Our neighborhood is nice - loads of families, which means we probably don't have enough candy for tonight!  We have air-conditioning in some rooms, but the trade winds and our elevation (right at 1000 feet) make for nice circulation through the house if we throw open our windows.  Especially our front door, which has a separate screen door in front for just that thing.  Haven't had a screened front door since my parents' house! Anyhow, since I throw open the windows every morning, I find that there's so much sound!  Cars driving down the street, dogs barking, people's conversations - I have to be careful about singing along to my ipod. :)  Such a difference from Florida, where one goes from a sealed air-conditioned house to a sealed air-conditioned car. It's amazing how much goes on that you hear when your windows are open!  I know that's sort of a captain-obvious observation, but it just shows how insulated our FL existence was.  I suppose it's largely good - I sometimes get easily freaked-out by unidentifiable noises, but leaving the windows open and spending so much time in our house (again, a strange benefit of not having a job) as well as a much smaller house, I feel a lot more secure here than I have in previous homes.  Maybe that's just a function of my own growth in general.  Another topic for another time.

Other topics for other times: the process of finding a church, what it's like to be "on sabbatical" for the first time in my life, and what new things we've learned through each of our moves.

Not sure what I will wind up doing for work, but am patiently waiting on submitted resumes and sending new ones out when I see something interesting.  What I want to do is tackle my projects list and get to reading.  In time.

I love that we have both mountains and ocean again.

And because we're just on the other side of the Ko'olau mountain range and the wet windward side, we get brief little showers virtually every day, as well as rainbows virtually every day.  But the rain is so gentle, and it spares us from running the sprinklers on the yard.

1 I distinctly remember being peeved four years ago when we moved into the home we built and lamenting that all my school load was robbing me of the ability to enjoy the setting-up-the-house time.  That's been redeemed - I don't have anything to do now besides that here!

3...2...1...

I finally got to see a shuttle launch all up-close-and-personal!

I often disparage the local news channel, especially after having been edited to sound like an absolute ignoramus, but one thing they do really well is NASA coverage. I just happened to see, sometime on Friday, that there was a shuttle mission scheduled to launch early Monday morning. And, most fortuitously, I am on Spring Break right now, so even if it had been scrubbed, I still had a week's worth of early mornings available! AND it was scheduled for 621a, about 30 minutes before sunrise. I thought I had totally missed my last chance for a night launch in August, but no! Hooray! So I immediately made plans to drive to the coast. Which brings me to this morning:

At 200a, after grading papers for what seems like a fortnight, I made myself a travel-mug of coffee, packed up a bag and a lawn chair, and drove off towards Titusville. I was aiming for Space View Park, across the Indian River from Cape Canaveral. It took about 40 min to get there from home (not so on the way back...), and at T-2.5h, there were a fair number of people out and about, but I was able to get free parking within a couple blocks. Before I even got to the park, I noticed a grassy area right up on the water in front of a condo building, and with some prime seating available. So I dropped anchor there, between two palm trees, about ten feet from the shore, with a clear view of the floodlit launch pad. The only thing missing was the park's live control-room audio, but I did have (read: steal) someone's free wireless signal, which meant I could follow the launch blog. And besides, once things get going, you know it!

There was a quiet electricity running through the still-small crowd, and people of all ages were sleeping on blankets on the ground, waiting. The hush was almost reverential. I had packed my ipod, a book, and some knitting to pass the time, but after being up for almost 24h by that point, all I wanted to do was sleep. I was wearing pants, a sweatshirt, and a turtleneck for the 50-something-degree air, and as I was getting out of the car, I thought "why do I need my blanket, it's fine out?". Fool. I know exactly when the lowest temperature of the day happens (right before sunrise), and I hadn't taken into consideration any shoreline breeze when I made that judgment. So, without the expectant giddiness of an imminent shuttle launch, I'd have been pretty miserably cold and sleepy. I managed to nap in my lawn chair for about 20 minutes or so. Checked the blog - everything was still go for launch. There had been some concern about fog and low cloud, but it was perfectly clear. I curled back up in my chair and got another 20 min of sleep. I woke up just in time to miss the ISS passing overhead (grrr). I looked behind me and the crowd around me had quadrupled and had a completely different energy about it. 20 minutes to launch! In what seemed like hardly any time at all, I heard a shouted countdown from one of the viewers somewhere behind me!

I hadn't taken much photographic equipment - no tripod, no telephoto, etc, just my phone (for video) and handheld SLR - because I wanted to actually experience the launch, not "watch" it with my nose stuck behind a viewfinder, trying to get a good shot. I partially succeeded. The photographer in me, though, couldn't help herself (especially with all the tripods set up around me), and I wound up still trying to make some pictures. My photos turned out pretty crappy, but they're not meant to be art, just mere snapshots for my own memory.

It lifted off, and, boy, is the view across the water at night something else! While the first splashes of pre-dawn blue spread across the eastern sky, Discovery rose pretty high pretty fast. It still took a while (a couple minutes) for the sound to finally reach us. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard. A constant, rolling rumbling thunder that just kept going. Spread out over us like ripples in a pond. It's amazing what 30-miles-closer-to-the-coast does for viewing. Shuttles always take off towards the northeast, away from home; as it gets downrange, it gets harder and harder to see, especially with the curvature of the earth and houses and trees obscuring the horizon. Not so on the ocean! We could see it clearly and high for a long time. Even solid-booster-rocket separation (for which everyone cheered - so cute!). As it continued to slip the surly bonds of Earth, this lovely comet-like corona formed around it. I'd never seen anything like it before.

And of course, all that water-vapor spewed into the mesosphere makes for some stunning clouds, particularly after sunset. One of the most beautiful launches (and subsequent clouds) happened about a year ago, just after sunset, also with Discovery. Same lighting, except back-lit instead of from the front. As the sun sank below the horizon to us, it left just the top part of the exhaust trail brightly illuminated, then splashed it with reds and oranges against the inky sky. This time, as the shuttle rose, the sun spot-lit the very top of the trail and continued to illuminate more and more of it as the sky grew lighter.

I stuck around for about 20 minutes after the launch, knowing that trying to get into my car and head back out was a ridiculous idea. Besides, I hadn't actually made it down to the park, and I was praying for a bathroom. I wandered over to the park, which was clearing out, and I was really glad I'd set up camp where I did. The park is nice, but I feel like I had a better viewpoint with far fewer trees and people. I milled around, taking pictures of the filaments of cloud that were starting to tangle and twist in the jet stream. Finally joined the bathroom line, then headed back to the car.

I'm eternally grateful for the GPS in my dashboard, and I realized that I could probably circumvent some traffic if I headed south and joined up with I-95 one exit south of the one I took. Foolish move #3 (#1 was the 24oz of coffee in my system with no bathroom nearby, in case you were keeping track). The on-ramp to I-95 for which I was heading was closed. I don't know what the deal was, but I wound up taking a circuitous route involving SR50 through Christmas, 520 back southeast to the Beeline (SR528) and finally home. After about 2.5 hours! In retrospect, I'd have slept in my car for an hour, grabbed breakfast in Titusville as the rest of the tourists were clearing out, and gotten home at the same time a bit better-rested. Lessons learned.

Nevertheless, I can't wait for the next one! There are only about four left, if we're lucky. I can't help but wonder what will befall the area when the space program changes with the demise of the Space Shuttle program. The Space Coast already seems like a bit of an anachronism, what with the low-rise mid-century ranch homes and this late-60s mystique about the place. You expect to see government engineers with short-sleeve dress-shirts, pocket protectors, and heavy black-framed glasses working in fluorescent-lit offices with acoustical tile and green metal file cabinets. Very I Dream of Jeannie. Some of my compatriots in the bathroom line were of an age that made me think they'd lived on the coast since the inception of the space program, when their husbands (or maybe even they, but that glass ceiling hasn't been cracked for that long), took a job at the insistence of a young president on an otherwise sleepy beach in Florida some forty years ago. They'd probably seen hundreds of launches - rockets and shuttles, successes and failures - and yet they still come out at dawn for one more before the fleet is mothballed.

I have mixed emotions about the shuttering of shuttle flight with no viable alternative, save for some private-venture upstarts. I'm all for progress, and I know that programs get scuttled and funding gets cut, but the space program seems to be dying a slow graceless death even as Discovery gracefully takes wing above it all. Is the Last Frontier nothing but boring to us now? Maybe it's a symptom of a greater trend - as we look around more at ourselves and less to the heavens.

Long Weekend

Even though (because?) I have tons of work to do this weekend, I'm really glad for the holiday weekend. This morning, I worked against some of my sleep deficit, which grew significantly this week and left me vulnerable to an opportunistic cold virus. I slept until 930a, which was perfect - long enough for good rest, but not too long that I felt I squandered the morning.

Yesterday's grey all-day rain gave way to clear-and-cool today, and I spent far too much of it indoors. As the sun sank, I decided to follow the very advice I gave to someone earlier this afternoon. I took a 45-minute walk around the neighborhood and down to the lake. Meanwhile, I got to see/hear some of the early-evening international arrivals and departures on 35R.

Ah, Spring

We're on spring break, and we've had shockingly beautiful weather, real chamber-of-commerce kinds of days. And perhaps it's a bit ungrateful for me to say that I am not quite ready for summer. I'm reluctant to give up my wool and my turtlenecks, even though we have had a decent run of winter. But I'm not quite ready for the summer pattern just yet. That said, we've had a string of days lately that start out pleasantly cool but quickly climb into the 80s under clear skies.

A friend and I spent a lovely day out in town yesterday, at Leu Gardens for a portion of it. The garden admission is waived on Mondays before noon, so it was crowded with retirees, mothers with strollers, and an army of SLR-bearing photographers. Not that we weren't part of it...

Saturday Morning Report

I'm sitting outside on a glorious Saturday morning.  I'm sitting on an airy patio at Whole Foods, waiting for members of my book club.  It's shockingly beautiful outside - just some cirrus in the sky, temperate now but will reach the 80s this afternoon.  There's a farmer's market 50 feet from me.  I have a coffee and a pretzel roll, and I'm listening to a guy-with-a-guitar.  When I saw him drop off his equipment, I immediately figured he was going to drive me inside quickly.  But then he starts playing U2's All I Want Is You, which is one of my favorite songs.  I tell him this, so he aims to go 2 for 2.  Next on his list is The Beatles' In My Life.  Check.

At this point, I don't care if anyone shows up for book club, this is such a delightful way to spend a morning!  Some fresh fruit and chocolate-hazelnut gelato from the market might gild the lily.

Meteorologica

About a week ago, with the onset of April, we had our first taste of summer. Humid mornings, towering clouds swelling to afternoon thunderstorms, temperatures in the upper 80s. I wasn't prepared. Readying myself for open-toed shoes and sandals is hard enough, much less for short sleeves and skirts. Today, though, we had another dose of winter weather. That which passes for winter in Florida: grey skies, drizzle, temperatures barely climbing out of the 60s.

In today's (however brief) return of all-day rain, things just strike me as a little more vibrant than usual. That probably has more to do with the soaking showers we had a week ago, but without the bleaching of strong overhead sun, colors seem a bit more intense today. It reminds me of California. Before the winter weather patterns arrive, the hills turn golden brown in early summer and remain that way through most of the fall. Oh, there's moisture in the air - just barely enough to sustain some kind of dormancy - but no real rain for months. When the rains do come again, green spreads itself over the hills about a week later. I remember returning from Thanksgiving in Indiana one year to see the hills had greened up in our absence; on the long approach path into San Jose from the south that parallels the 101, such delight it was to see that color again. When it does return, it's like an old friend you haven't seen in a while. You don't realize how much you had missed him until he's in your presence.


In my chemistry classes, I teach that acid-base indicators have two forms, one color in the presence of a base and another color in acid. The transition color - a blend between the two, like orange between red and yellow - isn't a separate third form, it is an equilibrium of both colors. Does spring truly exist? Perhaps spring isn't its own season distinct from winter or summer, but instead, it is equal parts both. This swing from winter into summer and back to winter will be followed by summer again - I'm hoping for at least a few days before this happens. I'm grateful for a prolonged slide into summer, but I know this reaction will inevitably go to completion. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the overstuffed clouds and the lightning. But I'll wait patiently for October.

Thunderstorms

We had quite the stormy night tonight, and I'm reminded of a piece by Garrison Keillor (from salon.com, June 2001) that I've held onto for years:

Some big thunderstorms rolled across St. Paul last week, with lots of nearby lightning strikes to shake the windows and a downpour of rain, and Mr. Blue got to stand on the front porch with Baby Blue and enjoy the rock 'n' roll. It's a modest life here in River City, no struggle for fame and power, just the occasional spell of weather, and a good June thunderstorm is a great boon in every way. It rinses the air and greens up the lawn and garden and gives us a demonstration of power far beyond human control. And the thunderclaps make a little girl laugh out loud. And afterward everything is somehow changed, the ions rearrange. You go for a walk after a good rollicking thunderstorm and feel your own life slightly altered. We live in a mixed bag of a neighborhood, the sort of neighborhood you find a lot of in St. Paul, which doesn't have lawn police, and as you stroll around, you pass old manses lovingly restored and Home & Garden yards and you also pass old manses with trees growing out of the eaves and ancient rags for curtains and yards that look as if the owners are seriously on heroin. But after a deluge, we're all refreshed, obsessive and neglectful alike, and a sort of democracy of meteorology prevails. And as I write this, the sky is darkening and the light turning purplish and there is a great stillness in the yard. Two hundred miles east of here, a westbound plane from Boston is slowing down as the FAA computers tracking the storm rearrange the landing slots at Minneapolis-St. Paul and the sleeping forms in Row 23 stir slightly at the change of engine pitch and the pilot comes on the P.A. and warns of possible turbulence and the lady in 2A asks for another bloody mary and west of here the farmers whose fields are already soggy go to the refrigerator and get out a beer and here in our house a little girl looks out the window at the dark sky and turns to me and says, "Boom!"

After further deliberation, I've decided to append a couple albums to my last list of albums with no bad tracks. Which edges it to a Great Eight list instead of a Top Five, but let's be honest - I've always played fast and loose with the constrictions of five.

1. U2 - Achtung Baby
2. Dave Matthews Band - Crash
3. 10,000 Maniacs - MTV Unplugged
4. Paul Simon - Rhythm of the Saints
5. Simon & Garfunkel - Concert in Central Park
6. Soundtrack - The Last of the Mohicans
7. Leeland - The Sound of Melodies

On the Road

(Yeah, it's a back-dated post. Leave me alone. I only have dial-up here. Makes it tougher to spend time online.)

I drove the length of Indiana today, from my in-laws in the south to my parents in the north. Almost five hours of driving gave me a lot of head-time. Here are some of the things I scrawled on the fast-food bag laying in my passenger seat:

It's remarkable how I take my iPod and XM radio for granted. I'm at the mercy of a "seek" button and a lot of FM junk. Why so many automobile manufacturers fail to include a "scan" button on their radios is a mystery. By the way, I'm driving this Suzuki that's the product of some cross-pollination between an SUV and a station-wagon. It was dreadful enough until my father-in-law proclaimed it "a hearse". Crap - he's totally right.

Driving across expansive stretches of gently rolling farmland, I wonder whether my affinity for this kind of countryside is merely a product of the location of my upbringing. Granted, I've lived in and visited some excruciatingly beautiful places (sorry, Florida is not one of them...) - but there's something appealing about this kind of scene. I'm sure not everyone shares my opinion. I mean, who's going to deny that there are some places on earth that everyone finds unspeakably beautiful. But I can't imagine the same percentage would hold midwestern corn fields in the same esteem as I do. But if I'd grown up in Florida, would I consider swampy marshes as lovely? Maybe it's a moot point, trying to separate out the pure beauty from that which is simply familiar. Beauty is beauty. A product of the beholder, yes, but why question it?

Top Five Midwestern Ephemera

1. A dark sky, highlighted by the silvery undersides of maple leaves exposed by the gusts of an approaching storm. There's always a crescendo to a storm - when the sky gets progressively more ominous, but there's always a subtle dissatisfaction to the denouement, as the sky begins to lighten.

2. A temperate summer morning - not cool, but not overly warm, either - one you know is going to give way to a toasty afternoon later. We never seem to get these in Florida, presumably because of the humidity, which tends to assault you as you step out the door.

3. A bright snowy night, as any available light gets bounced all around off myriad white surfaces.

4. Tree trunks darkened by spring rain, punctuated by the bright green of young leaves on an overcast day. Also: The same thing in autumn, when those leaves have turned red and orange.

5. Late afternoon sunshine across fields in late autumn. Pewter stratocumulus in the sky, growing progressively more grey as the sun slips below them and casts sidelong illumination, gilding everything it touches.

One fun thing about driving long stretches in Indiana is the License Plate Game. License plates are issued by county, of course, and the first digits on standard plates indicate the county. So, 71 is St. Joseph (South Bend), 79 is Tippecanoe (Lafayette), 49 is Marion (Indianapolis). When I was young - middle school, maybe - my parents and I went to Indianapolis for the State Fair one summer. [Warning: severe geekiness to follow!] In advance of the trip, I made a spreadsheet on our new computer (using Lotus 1-2-3, a precursor to Microsoft Excel. On a DOS platform! And an amber monochrome monitor!) of all 92 counties in Indiana, along with their corresponding license plate number - they're numbered in alphabetical order. I remember the hardest to find was Switzerland county (77, IIRC...?) - a tiny little county in southeastern Indiana. Oh, the joy when I finally found that one! Anyhow, it was fun, playing that game again (without my lists, I got to be pretty good about interpolating between counties I knew; I've gotten rusty in the past decade) - though a lot of the fun has been lost with the rise in popularity of specialty plates, which carry no county designation.

I passed an old stone church for sale, on US31 in Tipton County, I think. Too bad there's not much around it, because it would be an awesome building to buy and turn into a bed-and-breakfast! I've long harbored desire for architectural reuse. As I've mentioned in this blog before and am too lazy to link right now.

Train tracks. This state is lousy with 'em. There really aren't many in Monterey, and I don't encounter many in Orlando, either - roads are built around or over them.

Just north of Indianapolis is a Wendy's on US 31 that was always the first indication that you're entering the Indy metro area. At least it was for me as a kid. Now, there's so much development going on around it, I hardly recognize the landmark.

Passed a fancy-looking high school (Westfield?) north of Indianapolis that advertises itself as a Verizon Smart Campus. Remind me to look this up later.

I should make some baklava when I get back to my kitchen. I haven't made that in a while. We also need to have a housewarming party. If for no other reason than to give us a deadline to finish painting the bathrooms. :)

Stopped at Trader Joe's in Castleton (NE Indianapolis). I went in looking for vanilla paste. Came out with $55 worth of stuff - and no vanilla paste. :-\ Did get some interesting foods. I shall report back later on them. Passed the hotel where I remember staying with my parents and some friends for the 1994 boys basketball state tournament, which our high school won. Turns out two of the players from that team have returned to the school as coaches. I wonder how that is, to be a player, with a giant picture of your coach at your age, staring down on you from above the bleachers. I know I'm romanticizing it all, but I can't help but think of Hoosiers. Which is a good movie, by the way. Go rent it - if you've never seen it, you are wrong.

More fields. Seed corn signs at the side of the road. Lonely irrigation sprinklers amid the dessicated remnants of chopped stalks. The demise of the family farm at the hands of mega-agribusiness operations saddens me, even though it seems an inevitability. Cue the John Mellencamp... seek... seek... seek... oh wait, there it is! Rain on the scarecrow...

Just when I looked down to my gauges and see that the temperature outside is 32, I notice some stuff in my headlights. Snow! Just a flurry here and there at first, but as I put my car in park, big floofy flakes started to fall. We have more in store for this week! A nice welcome "home". I catch myself when referring to this as home. I grew up here. Lived in this state for 24 years and one week (minus one summer). But looking around at all the changes, it's no more home than any other place, really. I suppose it always will be home, even if only home to my memories. Which grow fonder with time. It really was a good place to grow up.

Homecoming

So I'm back at Purdue for Homecoming weekend, with a science alumni board meeting tomorrow, tailgating festivities Saturday morning, football game Saturday afternoon, then back home on Sunday (missing the Mythbusters Sunday afternoon - that's a whole other rant I don't want to get into right now). I've never come home for homecoming, so it's kind of fun to be part of it all. Met some guy at the rental car counter who is back for his 50th reunion and some fraternity thing.

Anyhow, our flight was delayed from Cleveland, which means I just got to Lafayette about a half-hour ago. Driving I-65 from Indianapolis, I was awash with a flood of memories. I'm sure there will be quite the deluge tomorrow, too. I'm not going to even operate under the pretense that I'm not going to indulge in nostalgia. I'm just giving into it. It's too big a force to resist.

Via the scan button (took a few minutes to figure out the radio - why is it that American car stereos are so difficult to figure out?), I stumbled across an FM station playing 24-7 Christmas music. ?? People. It's not even Halloween yet!

It's perfect autumn weather forecast for the weekend - turtleneck-sweater-and-boot weather. I can't even explain how excited I am about this; I have grown weary of Florida and its 80s.

On the Color of Lightning

We had a grey, windy, rainy day today. The kinds of mornings of which I have written. It was a stretch, but I made it into boot and sweater weather.

Tonight, on the drive home, the lightning was almost olive-green. Normally lightning here has a bluish or purplish tone to otherwise white light. Tonight, a storm in the distance had lightning with the most green cast I've ever seen lightning have.

Autumn Weather, Memories, and Autumn Weather Memories

It's kind of hard(1) to justify blogging when I have committee notes to transcribe. It's a little harder to justify when the committee chair reads my blog. But! I finished that last night, so I feel unencumbered to blog away. Until I look over at the mountain of papers that need grading. But the night is young.

On the way home from school Monday, I put the iPod on random shuffle. One song that came up as I got close to the airport was El Condor Pasa, recorded by Simon & Garfunkel. I heard the opening notes and was instantly transported to a scene, about a dozen years ago. I had checked this album out from the library - my senior year, maybe my junior year of high school - and doing my homework while listening to this album. It had to be late fall, because I remember it was dark relatively early. I distinctly remember sitting at my desk in the corner of my bedroom, working on math homework, it was dark outside, and I was listening to this album.

Isn't it fantastic how strongly associative both music and smells are? They are incredible memory-triggers. I know it's a common phenomenon, and I don't know enough neuroscience to know the details of the mechanisms. Why are scents and sounds so associative? I can smell Christian Dior Dune perfume on someone and instantly, I'm back walking the streets of Belgium with a friend who wore that scent that summer. Or I can smell ckOne and it's my freshman year of college again, and I'm at my closet in my dorm room getting ready to go to class. It's weird stuff, the connections between our senses and our memories, but I like it. Now that my grandparents are gone, I fear I'll never smell their basement again. Sort of a mothball-ish scent, something sort of aftershave-y, something kind of kitchen-y, and decidedly unique. One of my favorite smells.

Speaking of late fall evenings, I really want some autumn weather. Now. I want warm sunny days and cool crisp nights. I want shocks of color in the trees, golden sunlight darting beneath leaden grey clouds. I want sweaters and turtlenecks and boots. I want rainy October evenings that plaster leaves to the streets. I want apples and popcorn and football games.

Apparently, what I want is the midwest. I'm insanely jealous of all of you with high temperatures in the 50s. Another day in the 90s...

That said, we had some kind of tropical wave pass through today, which made for a grey all-day rain. Highs in the low 80s, and some wind. If this is what passes for fall weather, I'll take it. One of my favorite weather memories, if you will, is of elementary school and having one of those October days that starts out dark and rainy and never really brightens. The kind of day where the incandescents inside are brighter than the daylight outside, coupled with a constant chilly rain. I don't know why I think of elementary school when I think of this weather, maybe because those classrooms had the most and biggest windows. I think it is the windows - because that kind of weather makes me think of rainy autumn evenings - even those that gave way to snow - in grad school, in an apartment with fantastic windows. Common vitreous denominator.

(1) Just kind of.

Weather Geekery

Latest installment in the I-don't-have-time-to-write-a-real-post-so-I'm-just-
going-to-link-to-something-interesting page that used to be my blog before school resumed:

Footage from the cockpit of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft during a nighttime core-punch, as it were, of the eyewall of Hurricane Felix. Click.

Shuttle Lift-off

Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off today. This picture was taken from our neighborhood, 45 mi away - apologies for nothing in the frame for scale. With binoculars, I could see the solid-rocket booster separation. < /nerd>


These are the kinds of clouds we get about an hour or two after a launch:

Back Home Again...

In Indiana...

I am amazed by clear skies at 400p. In FL, we'd already be on our second round of thunderstorms by now. It is amusing to see everyone complain about how hot it is.; air temperatures in the 80s are actually refreshing. I'm also startled by how green it is. We normally come back to Indiana in the dead of winter - for Christmas - and it's usually very grey and barren and cold. The corn is pretty tall, it's light out until 900p (I don't understand how this works - I guess we're just that far west in the time zone), and there's even a bit of topography, too. Okay, the topography doesn't change in the summer, but it's shocking to see even rolling hills after acclimating to Florida's lack of them.

Not much internet access, and I'll be busy with wedding stuffs soon. Updates when possible. I know you're dizzy with anticipation.

Even More Miscellany

This is bad. I've been procrastinating and generally undermotivated for the past week or so. I'm talking set-the-alarm-for-nine-AM-and-still-smack-snooze- for-an-hour brand of unmotivation. Well, I can write it off to summer, right? I don't get the luxury of laziness the other nine months of the year. I did get my laboratory balance bench (and all the balances) clean today, so I don't feel too badly about it all.

Today's On-The-Go Playlist (or What I Sang Along With While I Cleaned My Lab):
Under African Skies, Paul Simon
Into the Night, Benny Mardones
Anything Genuine, Smalltown Poets
The Way, Telecast
Jesse's Girl, Rick Springfield
Creep, Radiohead
Window, Guster
King of New Orleans, Better Than Ezra
Lackluster, Poi Dog Pondering
Uninvited, Alanis Morrissette
Here's Where the Story Ends, The Sundays
Cry on My Shoulder, Overflow
No One is to Blame, Howard Jones
When You're Falling, Afro Celt Sound System
And So It Goes, Billy Joel
Under the Milky Way, The Church
Hang Me Up to Dry, Cold War Kids
Don't Drink the Water, Dave Matthews
Bang Bang, David Sanborn
Allison Road, Gin Blossoms
Sexy Back, Justin Timberlake (1)
Fast Love, George Michael
Maneater, Nelly Furtado (2)
Ruby, Kaiser Chiefs
Too Much, Leeland
Don't Look Back in Anger, Oasis
All This Time, Sting
Old Friends, Simon & Garfunkel
1000 Julys, Third Eye Blind
Stay - Far Away So Close, U2
Time of the Season, The Zombies
Key West Intermezzo, John Mellencamp
Synchronicity II, The Police

(1) I don't respect myself for this; I don't expect you to, either.
(2) I'm a bit disturbed that I own this, mostly because Ms. Furtado belongs to a group of female singers that make my ears bleed (also: Paula Cole and Shakira). But this song is different. It's a fantastic tango. Maybe that's its redeeming factor.


Just so you know, the quality of a soft drink is directly proportional to the quality of the ice floating in it. Tijuana Flats serves some of the best soda in the world simply because they put crushed ice in it, not cubes. And slushy = good. The miniature golf establishment where I worked throughout high school and college had awesome Dr. Pepper, partly because the syrup-to-water ratio was relatively high, but mostly because the ice was killer. It had a peculiar temperature cycle and would occasionally produce very icy ice, but then, about twenty minutes later, it would spit out fresh, soft, wet ice that I don't even know how to describe. They weren't exactly cubes. Not exactly pellets, either. Anyhow, most times, the drink was just a vehicle for the ice. I wasn't above just eating cups of ice straight up, either - maybe it was my burgeoning ice connoisseurship, maybe it was a symptom of the anemia I had for years. (shrug) I never cared for fizzy drinks as a child - they were like an assault on the tongue. I guess when I think about it, I have an unconventional food history - I never ate typical American kid food - I only discovered the joys of mac & cheese within the past five years, I can count on one hand the number of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I've consumed (okay, I can count on one finger the number I've even tasted. I only like peanut butter in cookies. Friends loved going trick-or-treating with me because they got all my Reese's cups. That's all right - banana taffy was totally a fair trade.). So I never really drank soda pop until I took that job, but it was free for the drinking as long as you were judicious with your cup usage (I brought my own - nerd. I had two I used all the time, they're in the picture over there - bigger nerd. That picture is from the auction I just bid on - biggest nerd ever!). I hear that glorious ice machine has since been replaced. Ah, one can never truly go home.

What a digressive paragraph! At least it started and finished with ice. :)


I'm learning how to do latte art; I'm amazed by this stuff. And this. I'll be excited when I can just do a simple rosetta. It seems pretty easy, watching the training videos, but I practiced some tonight. It's clearly one of those skills that the people who are good at it, well, they just make it look maddeningly effortless. Figure skating is another one of those things. Anyhow, the texture of the milk is crucial - it has to be. Because I think my milk is sadly a bit too foamy. If you watch people do it, it seems like the bright white foam is still fairly fluid. Mine tonight was *fantastic* for cappuccinos - I was constantly slurping foam, one bad attempt after another (wasn't gonna waste it...), but I never got anything remotely close to latte art. So it's gonna take far more practice, but I think figuring out the right milk texture is what makes or breaks it all. I also think I might pour too fast? Or maybe too slow. I don't know. I'm working the coffee bar on Sunday, so I'll have plenty of time to practice, though I wonder how our to-go cups are going to affect it.


We've had two days of awesome lightning - really electrified storms with really close strokes. I was going to write about the Turkey Lake Convergence Zone, but now I'm not feeling it. Remind me - some other time.

The alacrity by which our house is being constructed is almost alarming. We had the framing inspection last Friday, and by the end of work today, they've finished nearly all the drywall and the exterior stucco. If things keep at this pace, we'll be closing well before the projected late-October date.

Even though I give little credence to wine rankings and ratings, I love that Two-Buck Chuck just won this big wine competition. Let it be known that I would probably be willing to compromise my ethics to bring a Trader Joe's to central Florida. Let me know what it'll take, guys.

In a bit of an Iron Chef moment, I decided I should use up some pie crust in my freezer and a can of pumpkin in my pantry. So I made a pumpkin pie last night, which also gave me the excuse to use some of my new Ceylon cinnamon and whole nutmeg. Brian thinks pumpkin pie is akin to barf, which means I have a whole pie to myself! I'll own up to my gluttony when it comes to desserts. Also, I haven't had a grilled cheese sandwich in a long time. I think I'm going to go get some cottony white bread and plastic American cheese slices tomorrow before lunch. Mmmm...

Yes, I do realize that in one paragraph, I managed to extol the virtues of both fancypants spices and Kraft singles. Deal with it. :)

Cloudspotting

We had a good cloud week this week. A nice backlit storm on Tuesday gave a really spectacular iridescent pileus cloud.

And then we had some attractive mammatusy clouds tonight at sundown, after a (allegedly tornadic) storm passed through.