Some Non-trivial Things That Annoy Me.

[Jim]

I think given a choice between wildfires like the west coast is experiencing and hurricanes like we sometimes get, I'll take the hurricanes.

[Van Rijn]

I think given a choice between wildfires like the west coast is experiencing and hurricanes like we sometimes get, I'll take the hurricanes.

Heh. We used to get phone calls from my aunt (who lived in Kansas) when there was a moderate earthquake somewhere in California. She would ask how we were doing. Typically they were too small for us to take seriously (maybe some trivial damage at the epicenter, like some items falling from store shelves) and too far to matter anyway. She said she would take tornadoes over earthquakes, yet she had a house damaged and a close call where she had to seek shelter at a stranger’s home. I’ve only barely felt a few distant quakes in Ca. Nothing like the aftershocks I felt in Anchorage when I was a kid. How you feel about things depends on what you are used to.

There are places in California I wouldn’t choose to live, some spots near forested areas would be an example. It’s safer in regards to fire to be in well managed suburb or urban areas. The main issue where I live is dealing with smoke when it gets bad. That hasn’t been fun lately - if I remember correctly the freak lightning started in Northern CA around the 17th or 18th last month and that really set off some massive fires. We’ve had heavy but variable amounts of smoke locally since then and it has been annoying. I have been mostly staying inside. Most summer nights I open up for the cool air, but most nights recently it has been too smokey for that, and the days are often overcast with smoke. The last few days there’s been a heat wave and the delta breeze has cut off, so nights are too warm as well. I’m actually looking forward to fall and winter this year (I usually don’t much care for winter but between the hotter than usual summer and Covid-19 I couldn’t do much of what I wanted to anyway so I’m looking forward to the change of pace).

[Jim]

Our son got his masters from CalArts and stayed in LA afterward. He and his GF rented a small house. When we went for a visit I noticed he'd left a Crescent wrench on his gas meter. I told him he should take it in, but he said, "No, I leave it there in case there's an earthquake and I need to shut off the gas in a hurry."

[Noclevername]

It's amazing what you get used to ignoring. Wartime-equivalent numbers of highway fatalities don't deter drivers, folks build on known floodplains with alarming predictability, etc.

[ozduck]

My Gas Storage water heater has decided it is time to say goodbye and has sprung a leak. With plenty of signs of corrosion on the tank it is not worth attempting to repair it. A new one is coming tomorrow. I am actually not really too upset as we have had it for around 22 years. The manufacturing date is in early 1998 and I am sure we had it installed in late 1998. If every domestic appliance lasted for that length of time I would be very happy.

It, and the new one, run on ' local' Natural Gas. The main supply pipeline is around 1,500 km long but it is all within this state. Western Australia has huge reserves of Natural Gas.

[Trebuchet]

It appears a bit less smokey here today than yesterday, which I guess is good news. But there are still fires and people are losing there homes.

[Gillianren]

Fires actually started after I posted yesterday--there's one at a park near a friend's house in Tacoma, or was last night. (All things considered, I'm hoping it's out.) But at least ours weren't started by a gender reveal party?

[Trebuchet]

Fires actually started after I posted yesterday--there's one at a park near a friend's house in Tacoma, or was last night. (All things considered, I'm hoping it's out.) But at least ours weren't started by a gender reveal party?

I hope someone gets sued for everything on that one!

[grant hutchison]

"Gender reveal" is a new one on me. Having looked up the context, surely that should be "sex revelation" party?
When I first heard the expression (in the context of the wildfires) I assumed it had something to do with gender identity, but was a little puzzled how it would work.
"And it turns out I'm a male heterosexual, just as my parents always assumed!" Whoosh, fireworks!

Grant Hutchison

[Extravoice]

Back in my day, we announced a baby’s gender the old fashioned way:
(Video link)

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs


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[Van Rijn]

"Gender reveal" is a new one on me. Having looked up the context, surely that should be "sex revelation" party?
When I first heard the expression (in the context of the wildfires) I assumed it had something to do with gender identity, but was a little puzzled how it would work.
"And it turns out I'm a male heterosexual, just as my parents always assumed!" Whoosh, fireworks!

Grant Hutchison

I had the same thought. I expected it to be about someone revealing they are transgender (with gender identity being a subjective property), not parents revealing their unborn baby’s sex (an objective property probably determined using amniocentesis). For all the parents know, someday in the future the child might decide they are not the “gender” revealed in the party. I see the words “sex” and “gender” (and mostly “gender”) getting used in the wrong context a lot these days.

In any case, it was incredibly foolish to do what they did in light of the dry brush about. There is a reason fireworks are tightly restricted in California - our summers are always dry.

[grant hutchison]

In any case, it was incredibly foolish to do what they did in light of the dry brush about. There is a reason fireworks are tightly restricted in California - our summers are always dry.

Oh, for sure.
As far as I'm concerned, shooting burning things into the sky makes even less sense than firing bullets into the sky. Then again, I've never willingly attended a party, either, so almost everything about this event is incomprehensible to me.

ETA: On the sex/gender distinction, it was really only in the 1960s that people began to make the current distinction--I think originally in feminist critiques of societally impose "gender roles". So I'd have expected that confusion between the current usages would be more common among those of my generation, than among those of the "woke" generation currently in their peak reproductive years, who presumably invented this "gender reveal" thing. I'm guessing the word choice reflects some sort of squeamishness about sending out party invitations with the word "sex" written on them.

Grant Hutchison

[Gillianren]

People who have gender reveal parties are adamantly not woke; they are very couched in prescriptive gender roles. And often, they're not determined by amniocentesis, either; relatively few mothers have them. In point of fact I haven't, because there are other, safer ways of performing the tests that are generally done that way. Less accurate, and if you get certain worrying results they'll do it, but I still know Irene's XX because they do a test of the mother's blood that can find cells of the fetus's, and they told me before you'd be able to make a guess on an ultrasound--before, I'm pretty sure, the relevant bits have even formed. But most of those parties are not based on that test, either; mostly, they're based on "we looked at the ultrasound and are pretty sure we know," so there are probably certain children who don't have to be trans or what have you to prove their parents' party wrong. And of course the first woman to have a notable gender reveal party and start the trend had her child come out as trans, because irony isn't dead. Just seriously wounded.

[KaiYeves]

Even 25 years ago when I was a fetus, my Mom was content to just excitedly show creepy grainy ultrasound pics of me as a freaky-looking skull-headed frog-thing to her friends and they would nod along and pretend it was cute and not freaky even though she would probably have agreed if it wasn’t her kid.

[Extravoice]

Thirty years ago, we went full old-school and decided that we didn’t want to know our child’s sex until birth. The doctor and ultrasound techs were very accommodating.


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[grant hutchison]

Even 25 years ago when I was a fetus, my Mom was content to just excitedly show creepy grainy ultrasound pics of me as a freaky-looking skull-headed frog-thing to her friends and they would nod along and pretend it was cute and not freaky even though she would probably have agreed if it wasn’t her kid.

A colleague of mine used to have an odd "family portrait" on his desk. He'd volunteered to have his head scanned during the commissioning of our first MRI scanner, and had been presented with one of those vertical front-to-back cross-sectional views of his own head at the end of the process. He displayed this alongside the similar sectional ultrasound views of the heads of his two children in utero, all gathered together in a neat rectangular frame.
Most people claimed to be able to detect a family resemblance.

Grant Hutchison

[Trebuchet]

My back hurts.
My knee hurts.
Heck, my spirit hurts.
My internet doesn't work.
I told my niece not to come for a visit tomorrow, because we weren't up to it.
My gorgeous view is nothing but smoke.
My car has a transmission problem.
We should be at the Wooden Boat Festival this weekend, but can't.
I should be pitching pumpkins in two weeks, but can't.

I think I'll go and eat worms.

[Noclevername]

I think I'll go and eat worms.

We all have our coping mechanisms.

Seriously, I hope it gets better for you soon.

[Gillianren]

Earlier this week, the local military base posted notification on their Facebook page that they would be doing mortar and artillery practice Wednesday through Friday. My best friend shared the notification, and several of her friends promptly responded with, "Well, that's a good idea, given the high winds and dry conditions."

Yesterday, Graham got home from drill. He'd been annoyed lately that his unit seemed to be going back on their statement that he wasn't going to need a physical fitness test. He told me that they hadn't gone back on it, that other people were being required to take the test but not him. So he said the other people had taken the test, and everyone had been required to do the physical fitness work. I told him I was going to look at him, look out our window [at the heavy pall of smoke in the air], and look back at him. "The air is even worse up there," he said. "The base is on fire. It turns out they started a fire using tracer rounds."

[Trebuchet]

At 3:00 PM, I was going around the house turning on lights, because it was so dang dark. That's pretty trivial compared to the rest of the situation on the west coast of the USA. Air quality is terrible. Many homes have been destroyed, including 80% of a little town on the east end of my state. Conspiracy theories are rampant, leading some folks to act like idiots.
My wife showed me a picture from someone on Facebook of the sun as a pale orange dot. I went out and up on our upper deck to see what it looked like here. There wasn't even a bright spot.
We could really use some rain.

[Van Rijn]

I don’t have a Twitter account, but I saw a link to this, San Francisco played to Blade Runner 2049 music, with what seems to be drone footage, done well:

https://twitter.com/AnoncatSupport/s...40051953803271

Also various pictures, but also a lot of junk here, best to scroll down a bit:

https://twitter.com/hashtag/apocalyp...=hashtag_click

Many are playing with the “apocalypse” theme, but some seem to be taking it seriously.

The bay area got it worse than where I am, and it was really bad on Monday when there was a lot of wind. Here, air quality was listed as “very unhealthy” this morning and improved to merely “unhealthy” later. Overcast with smoke haze all day, but not super dark. Sacramento sometimes gets rain in September but the rainy season doesn’t usually really get going until November. September-October is usually when we get the most fires because plants have gone so long without rain, but the lightning gave us an early start.

[Gillianren]

A site I was looking at to check our air quality (current Olympia air quality index 146) lists the "major cities" by how bad their air is. Yesterday, four of the top ten were West Coast cities in the US; I'm pretty sure they only count four West Coast cities as "major" for the list. There was one Canadian West Coast city, likewise probably the only one they count as major. The air quality site suggests rain today; the Weather Channel, last I looked, did not. I'm hoping so much that the Weather Channel is wrong.

[ozduck]

My son had 'gone north' for a long weekend of fishing about 730 km north of here. Last night as we were well and truly settling into couch potato mode we got a call from him. He was having car trouble and was trying to nurse his car into the only city on his route. In the end it didn't quite make it and he was towed in. The trouble was as a small business owner he had to be in his office today - so parents to the rescue.

He was stranded in Geraldton a city of about 37,000 people that is the 3rd largest town in W.A. Unfortunately, it is also about 440 km (275 miles) from where we live.We left home just after 9 PM and picked him up around 1:30 AM. We made it back home just before 6 am. Once we got out of the metropolitan area there was very little traffic with most of the long distance trucks pulled into parking areas to avoid breaching there rest requirements. Luckily we only had only one kangaroo jump across the road in front of us and my son saw it in time to only need sharp, rather than panic, braking.

My 15 year old car is excellent for this sort of a trip. It has good cruise control, a long wheelbase, big softly cushioned seats and plenty of legroom. Even though it is a 3.6L V6 it is very economical on these long runs. The engine pretty much just ticks over at around 2,000 RPM at 110 km/hr.

By the time we got back into the outskirts of Perth the morning traffic was on the road with heavy traffic but at least it was moving freely. My sons car is at a mechanics in Geraldton now and if it can be repaired easily some of his fishing companions are returning to Perth on Saturday and they will pick it up on the way through.

We are all pretty tired but it at least it was an 'interesting' trip.

[Gillianren]

As a friend of mine put it last night, the rain was just enough to make wet smoke. Not enough to actually knock anything out of the air. And I ended up switching which website I use to look at our air quality, because it was consistently predicting our quality would be at least fifty points better than it was showing that it was at the moment. Which made me distrust what numbers it was giving us in the moment as well. Right now, we've got full-on smog out there, the fog having rolled in.

[Gillianren]

I opened the bedroom window for a minute. Maybe less.

[KaiYeves]

I wish we could send you one of these hurricanes to put out the fires.

[Trebuchet]

Yesterday I could see the sun as an orange ball. Today I can't see across the street. May be mostly fog, however.

[Delvo]

At least it's good for people who sell air filters.

[Gillianren]

Yesterday I could see the sun as an orange ball. Today I can't see across the street. May be mostly fog, however.

I know we had thunder in the night. Though it was sporadic enough so that, even though I saw a bunch of flashes, I never actually saw lightning--and it wasn't raining at the time, so it was just risking creating more fires. Still, our air is supposed to be back to LA In The '80s standards for the next few days.

[Trebuchet]

The news.
I should probably just stay off the internet except for kitten videos on YouTube.