nothing clever at the moment

oh yeah 30 °F and some mild spitting of something or other from the sky. every time we have a little thaw (and there have been many this january) and it gets cold again, that is below freezing, i get this feeling it's autumn again. very confusing.

yesterday there was a post on the infiltration forums about a girl falling to her death from a grain elevator in minnesota. tragic, to be sure, but someone also posted a link to her myspace page and it just took me out for a while. how do people get this way? i felt so sorry for her parents, for their loss, which i can barely imagine, and for her mom saying to the newspaper "She was a fun, well-rounded, emotionally sound, fun kid." was she aware of her daughter's web presence? maybe it's just a kind of show-boating nihilism, but really, i don't get it. i think that. except for the most pathological of liars, even the poses we strike reveal some indelible truth. so where did her fall begin, pardon the unfortunate metaphor?

i think about this a lot because i have a teenage son who, for the time being at least, is wonderful and smart and engaged and in no apparent danger of falling from anywhere (to be honest, it is his interest in urban exploration as a hobby that had me reading the infiltration fora in the first place). last saturday we spent much of the day at the solo and ensemble festival for high school bands. i never did anything like that when i was in high school; i was simply a bebop outlaw, although i got some encouragement in my junior and senior years. but he has been taking lessons, working on classical studies right alongside the concert band stuff, and listening to ben folds and xtc and nwa and john coltrane and all those other things i keep around the house, and he did very well on his solo piece, and his saxophone trio piece. whether he goes on to be a music major in college i can't really say, nor do i have any expectations or desires either way; it was simply an indescribable pleasure to see him so engaged, and involved, and thoroughly enjoying something that required no posing whatsoever.

i hope we can keep this going.

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they give no fuck

hullo there...been a while.

riding the bike has been an adventure of late, what with yesterday evening's whipping slushstorm, and this morning's sheets of ice and lusty wind gusts. turning that dodgy corner from state onto avis drive, i almost went down when i took a blast of headwind while hitting a patch of ice - the front wheel moved several inches to one side, but that was all; i somehow stayed up.

last night there was no ice but the rain/slush was coming down assertively. a guy nearly took me out with a classic right hook on packard at fourth ave., where i turn right anyway; it was a matter of inches. i took off in pursuit, adrenaline-fueled, but turned left at william as i usually do, considering that a) i had to get home so i could pick someone up from child care and 2) discretion is the better part of valor, or so they say. i'm not sure i want to get into the same awkward position as the city dog that finally catches the squirrel, wondering: now what? anyway, i will recognize the 1/4-ton pickup again by its bumperstickers: "vegan" and "peacemonger". there were more, but the first two were enough to get me going. at least i can be quite sure the fellow was a local. so yeah, that ben folds song...

i really wish i had the camera the other day (saturday it was) when i encountered, riding the bike across the u-m campus to celebrate a freshly-cleaned chain and a test application of phil wood's "tenacious oil" (which i will discuss further at another time), a red-tailed hawk grappling with a fox squirrel, right there on the grass near the grad library. the hawk had a pretty good grip on the squirrel with its talons, but was having difficulty finishing it off; whenever it would bend its head forward, presumably to get a grip on the squirrels neck and break it, it lost some leverage on the body and the squirrel would start to wriggle around too much. this went on for a while, with a small group of interested persons watching along with another squirrel, up in the tree (one of those tremendously beautiful burr oaks they have on the campus), who was definitely not rooting for the predator; me, i like hawks, but have no opinion of squirrels. the hawk would pause frequently to glare, long and hard, at the spectators (if you have ever considered trying to stare down a bird of prey, you should probably forget about it). suddenly, and i'm not really sure how it happened, but the squirrel got away, and ran up the tree, and the hawk s-l-o-w-l-y flew to a distant tree, and then back to the tree with the squirrels in it.

i don't know what happened after that, because it was a sunny day and i was eager to keep riding the bike. i hope that hawk got a meal, though.

it wouldn't be make believe

right around freezing this morning, on that crunchy layer of packed snow/ice in the neighborhood. and a few icy scares along the rest of the journey as well. wish i could find the camera.

it seems a little odd, in this consumer cliamte that is so aggresively directed by marketing and focus groups and similarly over-wrought concept wonks, that the daimler-chrysler company would cheerfully, and without guile, display at the north american auto show its concept car named the dodge "challenger". sure, some of us older types remember the original dodge challenger, with varying degrees of fondness, but certainly there are more of us for whom the name "challenger" represents horrific tragedy, something blowing to smithereens and all lives lost and no traces ever found. what exactly were the boys thinking of when they greenlighted that name again? of course this is the same industry that is worried about the decline in suv sales, which anybody could have seen coming (anyone not completely intoxicated by the copious profits generated from suv sales, that is). what are we to do? we totally flooded the market with these things, and now that everybody who wants one has one (or two, or three), we think maybe we may have a little extra capacity. and what's with the price of gas, anyway? what difference does that make? can't they just find some more oil? there's plenty, right? i don't know why they can't just find some more oil. i mean just do it, for christ's sake. when the man upstairs says "we need a retractable roof for 2004", we just do it. here's your retractable roof. oh yeah and on-board gps and stuff. just do it. so where's the gas? what's the deal with those guys?

on the subject of automobile names, i was nearly sideswiped by a subaru "tribeca" this morning. i'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. let's name a car after a trendy part of manhattan where you are better off not even owning a car. or is it the film festival, following the example of the plymouth "sundance"? here are some car names that haven't been used yet:

hibachi
pendant
temblor
puncture
stoat

we're only making plans

oh boy - 33 °F and raining, a steady soaking rain at that. that's a good ten degrees colder than the last steady soaking rain i rode through, and it was noticeable; that is, my face noticed, especially the fleshy parts, like the cheeks. i experimented with fewer clothing layers, and that turned out well: just a knobbly-textured long-sleeve jersey and the outer shell, which felt cool and light at first but turned out to be perfect once the core temperature rose a bit. so less sweating this time. but the rain made its way through the zippers of the neoprene booties, and my (wool) socks got a little wet. *sighs* the things i put with...

no pictures, the camera being temporarily deocularized. but the pool would look pretty much like it did the other day: gloomy, with drops a-ploppin'.

plop.

back to the middle of nowhere

i was going to write an open letter to the american family association, but i just don't have it in me right now. so, until i do, i will just say the usual: kiss my ass!!

it's been a mild week, going bare-legged and still sweating it up. woop woop...

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my technique is very necessary

fair is the sky, lightly damp the breeze. what better reason do i need? winter far from over, don't forget it, got to get some skiing in yet, but riding the bike, times like these, oh yes, thank you and please.

so we were having trouble reproducing thermal stratification in the lake lanier model, using efdc, and i put together a simple square basin (i call it the "skillet" model) to run some diagnostics, trying to cancel out complicated bathymetric and atmospheric effects and just see what was happening. initialize it stratified, with a nice, sharp thermocline, and then introduce some flow and/or wind and see what happens. well, what happened? putting warm water into the top layer, same temperature as the top layer so as to have neutral buoyancy, and say what? the water just mixes in the vertical, even with no apparent vertical eddy viscosity or diffusivity, what looks for all intents and purposes like warm water sinking into colder water? we pass these results on the the model's developer, asking "do you see what we see, and what are we doing wrong". the response is that they are having similar issues with another application, and are looking at earlier versions of the code (translation: a bug got introduced somewhere along the way), and are interested in a prompt resolution because they are under deadlines as well.

so there you have it: a) i am not crazy, and 2) look for a new, improved version of efdc in the near future.

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search the world around

so last night the clouds departed, and it cooled right on down. i don't know when the snow fell, however; it appears to have fallen on dry ground. we've already had more than 14 minutes of sunshine today, feeble as it is, but i don't know how long it will last. cold: 19 °F, and a light wind from the north that i truly hope will calm itself through the day. i reached straightaway for my new ski goggles, and it was altogether a pleasant ride in (the tailwind always helps). cheers, dear readers!

--->puff crunchy

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you can take a photograph

according to a story in the free press this morning, the national weather service's white lake township station reports a total of 14 minutes of sunshine since december 19, 2005. that seems about right; i had a vague recollection of sunny weather on the monday before winter break, which would indeed be the 19th. so it really has been bas lately, and today is as dark as ever. warm enough, as it turned out, for me to shed some layers before riding in this morning: short pants, no balaclava. the cool mist felt rather nice. the shins do get dirty, however, when the streets are in this kind of shape.

that one osage orange may have escaped being smushed beneath a bus, but there in the gutter like that the chances of a seed ever taking root are slim indeed. what will happen to it, exactly? our fair city does actually sweep these streets, bike lanes included, once or twice a year whether they need it or not. i'm thinking the sweepings end up in a landfill, so there you go: read my lips, no new maclura pomifera!

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now they know how many holes it takes

i have not been riding my bike enough, that is for sure. but who has time? i should, i suppose, but there have been those holidays, and all of these other things, so bicycling has gottn the short end of the time allocation stick. but anyway, magnificent it is, for those brief moments, to climb aboard and roll away from the house, that near-perfect silence of freshly-washed and lubricated drive train, the faintest whine only from the knobby tires, and the ticking of the moist grit as it is thrown onto the inside of the fenders. and above me the relentless dark, the steady procession of clouds, the great diversity of elevations and thicknesses and moisture contents and opacities, united to block out the sun for what seems like several weeks straight now, no clear memory in my mind of the last unbroken stretch of blue sky, the last crow's-feet squinting behind the windshield or right out in it, the rays heading straight into the eyeball, all wavelengths represented, the full spectrum as it were, thank you very much. when? i do not recall.

but i would welcome it again, any time.

so just fur left, and that bone and the strange fragment. who took the deer carcass? i know guys who tie their own trout flies and have a serious interest in squirrel tails and the like, but a deer carcass? it was really just skin and bones, as they say. dragging something like that off is faintly sick, or at least unnecessary. anyway. i have enough weird things to ponder at work today, anyway.

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