what a pumpkin

ooh dang, first frost...the thermometer at home read low 40s, but that was up in the robin hills of vesper heights; i checked the airport reading and it was 32 °F. so sure enough, when i rode by there i saw considerable frost in the drainage ditches and other low areas. but no pumpkins in sight.

fall is the shit. i hope it's like this in two weeks when i go to algonquin. need to go, want to go...

i somewhere where i

such a change in the weather over the day. this morning it was 43/41, dry and dew point, pretty cool actually, and calm and sunny. easy as pie. but then the ride home, and the clouds all moved in from the north and the west, and really quite a bit warmer (didn't check the temperature), and a fairly stiff wind blowin' me home, from the southwest mostly, and carrying with it the answer to at least one question of the day: how many years must the cannonballs fly, before they're forever banned?

in better news, a michigan circuit court judge ruled that our state's asinine (my word, not hers) constitutional amendment defining marriage does not preclude employers from offering health care benefits to their employees' same-sex partners. judge joyce draganchuk wrote "health care benefits for a spouse are benefits of employment, not benefits of marriage". thank you, your honor. this was, of course, at least one legimate fear of this amendment's passing, that fucktard groups like the american family association (i may have gotten their name wrong, but i believe u spelled "fucktard" correctly) would take its passage as carte blanche to begin chipping away at various hard-won civil rights that the gay and lesbian community has only recently begun to enjoy. although the struggle is not over, and is difficult here in this diverse yet polarized state, it is a small comort at least to have this particular ruling in place.

ann arbor is nice, and weird. i worked the polls last october and got to see the printout at the end of the day, and the marriage amendment failed 10 to 1 in our precinct (it did slightly worse than george bush) and that's just our quiet little northwestern area, by the water treatment plant. but you don't have to travel far to see the cloying red, white and blue ribbons and the stars and bars (to say nothing of the decals of calvin urinating on some truck logo), and the missouri synod lutherans and then the baptists and then all those other narrow-minded types. and you begin to wonder, am i somewhere where i can do some good? is it safety that i need? i know my own home, well enough, but is there somewhere i should be going to?

maybe now at least i should be going to bed.

--->puff o' bugster

rotation and translation

oh what a fabulous day for riding a bicycle. or anything outside, i guess. i only got to ride in this morning, with a perfectly matched set of wet/dry bulb temperatures: 51 °F and 51 °F. but this is not the sort of 100% humidity that persons ordinarily complain about (those persons who ordinarily complain about the weather, that is, instead of doing something about it). no sir, this is not that sort of humidity. in fact it is now 68 °F, with a dew point of 46 °F. and high pressure and lots of sun and just oh boy what am i doing inside? working, that's right, calculating recurrence intervals of flooding on the saginaw, looking for seasonality in the downstream stage at the bay, looking for other trends and figuring out what periods we should model, some floods and some not so floods. but i should be doing this after dark; now, at this time, i should be outside.

i have mentioned before that almost perfect moment at the beginning of the day, rolling along and hearing the almost perfect silence of my commuter bicycle. well, a little less perfect on mornings when i ride with the younger son up to school, but this morning about as close to perfect as one could expect, having spent some time last night cleaning the chain and the cog and chainring, and then tightening it up just so and then applying the triflow, and wiping the excess, and then this morning the glistening chain and the perfectly smooth and silent rotation of the chainring and cog and the wheels, and the perfectly smooth and silent translation of the chain, the top moving forward and the bottom moving backward, relative to the frame of the rider that is, the bottom actually moving forward as

omega1*r1*(rw/r2 - 1)

where:

omega1 = angular velocity of chainring (--)
r1 = radius of chainring (L)
rw = radius of wheel (L)
r2 = radius of cog (L)

but i digress. all i really want to get underneath me is that perfect smooth silence again, even if i have to battle a hundred white men in a hundred gmc envoys along the way. so here's hoping...

--->puff-a-diddle

lines of grime

there's one now. adding dissolved oxygen, frothing like a creamy sarsparilla. i'm trying to imagine what it smells like, but i'm coming up blank. or is that "scent-free"...

needless to say the great urgency of recent efforts to develop a general treatment strategy was, in part, a fiction born of bureaucracy. an ordinary person would have guessed that the corps was going to do what the corps was going to do, and that ordinary person would have been correct. in any event, the resubmergence of the ninth ward (along with other places) will probably just distribute the contaminants further about. that worst-case exposure pathway, of toxic-laden dust blowing about and being breathed deeply by emergency workers, no-bid contractors and other unfortunates was probably developed by someone from another, more arid climate. how dusty does nola get, exactly? my recollections are more along the lines of grime, of a clinging type of funk. dust is for deserts.

says i. we read elsewhere of a lad who left his fixed-gear bicycles behind, and through some sublime convergence of internet protocols we have conspired to assemble for him another bicycle, of fixed-gear design it almost went without saying, and we are optimistic enough to believe that we will actually get this bicycle to him, wherever it is he alights after this latter-day diaspora loses its energy and the settling velocities of the individual humans become dominant. but i do hope there is little in the way of toxic sludge, or dust, in that place he eventually rides this new bike.

--->crrrnch

epistrophy (not)

fall is here. is today john coltrane's birthday? i think so. this morning's ride in was a delight: 57 °F, 54 °C dew point, and a brisk wind from the north at 13 mph. just the thing when heading south on state street, eh? i was a' flyin', i was. and nice thunderstorms last night, lotsa cracklin' an' kablammin' an' all that. i been savin' up m' 'postrophes, jus' for this moment. now i'm layin' 'em on y'. here y' go...

well, sorry. i'm unable to use apostrophes unless they are actually required. so take your plurals and your possesive pronouns and shove them up your asshole, along with those apostrophes you always put in there, where they do not belong.

yeah you!

september song

not especially cool, but crisp all the same - 64°F, 58°F dewpoint, winds from the west at 12 mph. oh yes and sunny. summer took a powder last week, peeped back in on sunday, and has since resumed her seat by the door, awaiting a fortuitous moment in which to make good her escape.

two years ago today my mother died. i still forget that it happened, sometime. we had really only just begun to find our way out of that awful estrangement, which i blame on everybody and everything and just wanted to leave behind, along with all the other weirdness i brought into the family during those late 90s. analysis is powerful but can only go so far. i think she may have also been softened by a sense of her mortality, as those bladder tumors proved more and more difficult to remove completely. heaven knows my own sense of mortality keeps me from holding onto anger, even though i don't believe my end is near. but still...the last time i saw her (before going to the hospital, that is) was the night of the big blackout, and we were going to north carolina the next morning, and had all the packing to do and no lights, and no gas in the van, and me going over to my folks' house to get some gasoline out of my dad's lawn mower so we could drive at least to ohio or somewhere where we could fill the blinkin' tank, and then sitting in their back room (the "addition") with the oil lamp burning on the round oak table, just the way it used to burn on that table when it was on the side porch of the old house, and my mom looking very tired and picking at something, i think it was cottage cheese, wondering whether the nurse would be able to come by tomorrow and drain the stent or whatever it was she had to do. and then us leaving the next morning, hoping for good news as we made our way south. i did call her from the beach, and we chatted for a while, and it was actually pleasant. but then coming home, and starting school, and i didn't really have a chance to get over there one week after the next and then i got the phone call. and it was all over very soon after that.

what would you have to do, exactly, to go through this world, to live the life of a human being, doing all the things human beings do when they live in this world, and be able to say to yourself that was a good job i did there, i did right by everybody, no one was hurt, it was "all good"? i don't think you can. it's okay; that's just what it means to live here. but it becomes hard sometimes, to keep from screaming out against the trivial, the tremendous pressure that wealth exerts on us to be trivial, or to indulge our hedonistic tendencies, or just to forget about the other human beings in this world, as if their lives were in any (significant) way different from ours. humph. in the corner of my eye i see a soapbox, but i will resist mounting it. i will just go on.

--->crunchy

i shivered like a child

dang cold 50s and wet. such a change. earlier this week i was sweltering, but last night is gets quite cool, and the wind picks up, and then it starts raining, and by morning it was cold and still raining and when i rode my bike i wore more clothes than i have in months, fleece and shell and all that, and turned on the blinky and flashy lights on my bike, and just kinda hunkered my way to work. but it was okay. my bare legs got used to the lower temperatures (last winter i found i could wear shorts down into the 30s) and the mist on my face kept me cool and wistful-looking, that moist dripping runoff look that the camera likes. and then the sloshing onto the socks, and the soaking through the mesh of the cycling shoes, and that line of grit you get when you take off your socks after riding in the rain, the grey-brown haze on your shins above the grit line and the clean white ankle flesh below. thank gollum it's friday.

this rain is making me look forward to the next backpacking trip, making me think of algonquin park again. last fall's trip was certainly a rainy one - let's hope not so this time. but i am also looking forward to a little escape from present-day life...home is fine, as usual, as we get into the groove of this school year, the younger son in particular having to adapt to the pressures of fifth grade (the older son taking the pressures of tenth grade in stride along with everything else). but i've been kind of grumpy at work, feeling somewhat left behind and responsible for sweeping up unattractive bits. i am invaluable for doing this, of course, but my dissatisfaction is becoming acute.

of course, any more specific complaining and it starts to get recognizable, if you know what i mean. so i won't. but if something good happens you will read about it here.

--->puff

concerto in mildew

hmmmm. the distinctly musty, and not especially grand spencer hotel in wilmington delaware. why am i here, in this not-nice-smelling room? for a meeting, tomorrow, first with the folks around the corner at malcon pirnie and then all of us, driving down to dover, to meet with dnrec, about juat what it is that new castle county can do, in the future, with the wastewater generated by its future residents. so many options, and yet so many competing pollution control stratgeies. apparently the best solution is for future new castle county residents to live elsewhere.

and before coming here, instead of preparing for tomorrow's meeting, spending some two and a half hours in a conference call with epa hq and coe on the nola “unwatering” as it was infelicitously termed by some (the engineers in the crowd still preferred “dewatering”). received an interesting update from the ground, things are ahead of schedule, currently going at about 12,000 cfs. 60 Hz motors are going; 25 Hz are not. this high rate part is going rather quickly so time is of the essence if any treatment is going to be implemented. booms are either in place or on the way; aerators are next. tried to get hold of a corps guy to answer his question of how many, and where; couldn’t return calls. it looks like people are most concerned about keeping oil out of the marshes; there have already been times when pumps were shut down because big blobs of oil were approaching the intakes. in the longer term there is also sensitivity in keeping major nastiness away from oyster beds. i listened to a lot of discussion about what could be monitored in real time, although it wasn’t clear how that information could actually be used for decision-making. when you are moving 12,000 cfs impacts can occur quite swiftly, and to significant extents.

i think the big issue will be how to provide treatment to the “bottoms” as they are delicately called. there is some likelihood that, by the time we get to that point, it will be possible to convey at least some, and maybe a lot, of that stuff via the sanitary collection system, to the existing treatment plants. there won’t of course be biological treatment yet, but primary and disinfection will be a lot easier to manage, at least giving it a lick and a promise. plus the actual treatment rates may be low enough to make skid-mounted high-rate physical/chemical processes feasible, really take some metals out. we shall see. i'm not going to be headed there, but i will be able to keep track of things.

what is kind of crazy to think about is that, in a couple of weeks, things are probably going to be slow again. of course, maybe that means i can get back over to the velodrome...

soup's on

the entire world, or at least small concentrations therein, is wondering how the u.s. is going to deal with the human health and environmental impacts from the toxic and festering floodwaters in which new orleans is submerged. well, to paraphrase a certain prophet, a crunchy bug will guide them.

this is partly true.

i mentioned, in passing, a hyper-frantic state around the office (here in ann arbor as well as in d.c.) regarding a request from epa headquarters to "examine" the issue of providing treatment for the waters that are now, as we sit here, being pumped at astounding rates into lake pontchartrain and various canals. it's easy enough to imagine the kinds of treatment processes that would be appropriate, but any attempt to put numbers to the flow rates involved (thousands of cubic feet per second, larger than the largest wastewater treatment plants in the world, and then some) produces ridiculous quantities of chemicals, numbers of floating aerators, and so on. realistic? the real priority is keeping bodies from clogging the pumps. although i am led to believe that the pumps the corps is using would pass bodies without any problem. there is just this respect for the dead thing.

anyway, i've been compelled to contemplate this for the past few days. but no amount of lsd ingested as a teenager could have fully prepared me for the conversation this afternoon, taking a call at 5:15 (instead of just getting up and leaving), from m.s. and j.w., over at epa, just to talk over the basic quantities of things to order, just to get started. assume we have to add 2.5 mg/L of dissolved oxygen to 9,000 cfs, get 25-50 100 HP aerators. then ten 3,000 gallon trucks of 15% hypochlorite. how much ferric chloride? i was embarrased not to be able to remember how much iron is in a gallon of 36% ferric chloride solution. but we're going to get 30,000 gallons of that, too, just to get started. oh yeah, and 100 tons of powdered activated carbon. bring it in by helicopter.

shitfire.

i hope this helps.

what we're thinking is that, for now anyway, the water is not all that horrible. but as they get down to the dregs, that's going to be nasty as fuck. it may require pumping it right into tankers and treating it offsite somewhere. i hope that will be someone else's design challenge. i turned down the possibility of traveling to nola, to be owm's point person to keep track of treatment efficiency. a) i am not really the person to do that, and 2) i think headquarters should limit their oversight to what they can do from washington; the locals will have enough to do without bureaucrats getting in the way.

it would be very weird to return to nola like that, in that capacity, in the middle of all this. i was last there in 1987, under very, very different circumstances. it would make a nice story, that trip.

you did not read any of this, because it is strictly confidential.

--->love bug

untitled dream #4

jesus mary and joseph did i get rained on today. another one of those localized things, just the lightest mist outside the office, the sun still slanting in from the west and a brilliant, low rainbow in the eastern sky, and the rain getting progressively heavier as i headed north into town, and then waiting at the light at packard getting totallt drenched, and then the water rushing along the bike path, several inches deep, all standing waves and hydraulic jumps and all that. well, at least the lawn will get a good soaking thinks i, and as i ascended miller toward the robin hills of vesper heights the rain slackened, and after turning north on brooks i saw dry ground underneath the trees, and then 200 yards later it was bone dry, just like this morning, in fact like every morning, afternoon, evening and night for the past couple of weeks.

this is what we hydrologic modelers call "distributed" precipitation.

and me walking into the house, skin-soaked sopping wet and dripping, and the boys setting there waiting for me to get back and go to the back-to-school picnic, like nothing was wrong. rained out? what, are you kidding me?

work has been ridiculous these couple of days. what do you get when you mix the genuine urgency of the polluted floodwaters of new orleans, the formidable bureaucracy that is the u.s. epa, and the typical consultant's lust for conceptual design problems? trust me, you don't want to know.

the other day i sat down at the piano and a song popped out, one of those slightly demented but melodic post-bebop ditties i write from time to time. it has been stuck in my head, and a fruitful source of improvisatory gushing. the bridge needs a little work; i have the basic idea of reharmonizing the main melodic motif, but i have to develop it more. just as well; i get a little unnerved when they just spring out like that, sitting down and putting my hands onto the keyboard and just tapping out some suspended chords and a line on top. where do that shit come from? did i hear it in a dream?

time to dream a little dream tonight.