Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It finally feels like spring! That struck me today on my first full day back home after traveling in Georgia all last week. I've remarked before that being away for a week often makes gradual changes, like changing seasons, seem sudden. It's warm outside, with a forecast high of 79° today, it's sunny, and the air smells fresh.

Today's warm weather is more than just an accumulation of gradual changes, though. It's unseasonably warm. My weather app says it's 14° above the average high for April 14. I find that a bit surprising. If you'd asked me what's normal weather for mid- April around here I would've said "About 70". But apparently it's as likely to have a high of just 60 as to reach 70. 🤷

Well, these feelings of spring are only going to last for another day or so. The weather forecast calls for cooler and cloudy weather the next few days. But it looks like it might be warmer again by next weekend. Imagine that— a weekend of nice weather, when I'm here to enjoy it!

Right now it's one of those times of year when the daylight feel just about right. Sunrise today was 6:48am, which aligns well with my weekday 6:45am wake-up time. The sky starts to get bright, gradually, at 6:30. That helps me wake up naturally around the time of my alarm.

It's not perfect at this time of year, though. Sunset is at 5:54pm. That means it's already dark when I start cooking dinner. It's better than late December, when sunset before 5pm means it's dark before I even finish work for the day.

I do look forward to the summer when there will be light in the evenings, and I can do a thing like enjoy a drink on the balcony after dinner. Daylight Saving Time is coming in a bit over two weeks.... That will shift an hour of daylight into the evening right away. So maybe I'll start enjoying after-dinner daylight in March. Though that one-hour switch will plunge my wake-up time back into the dark for at least a month. Gotta take the good with the bad.

After Wednesday's bomb cyclone failed to deliver locally the violent weather its name suggests (though it did pack a wallop in Oregon and Washington) today a steady, soaking rain has set in. A look at the forecast shows that it's likely to rain here for the next four days. We could get several inches of rain over that time. The Sierra Nevada mountains on the eastern side of the state will likely get a lot of snow. Both are a good start to our winter rainy season.

The start of winter? Yes, by my observational standard, it is. Autumn around here begins when it gets cool enough to wear long pants and I need to turn on the heat in the house. Winter begins when it starts to rain regularly. The latter works because of the Mediterranean climate pattern we have in California. We have long, dry summers and mild, wet winters. Virtually all of our annual rainfall comes in a 4 month stretch from generally around mid-November to March. Thus why it's good to get the season started with a good soaker of a rainfall. We need to refill our reservoirs, snowpack, and groundwater tables so they can last us through the 8 dry months that follow the rainy season.

I've remarked before that one of the milestones I use to gauge when the seasons are changing is when I turn the heat on. Turning the heat on in the house is one indication Fall has arrived This is different from the traditional, solar calendar based season, which started on the equinox almost four weeks ago. It turned out to be warm that day, then shortly after we entered a heat wave that lasted 2 weeks. My gauge takes into account the region, the climate, and the weather rather than how many hours of daylight we get. (Though daylight is important, too. I hate when it's dark when I get up in morning and dark before I finish work!)

By this milestone of turning on the heat, Fall fell last night. I switched it on when I saw that overnight lows would dip to 52° F (11° C). Granted, I set the thermostat at a miserly 69° (20.5° C) as our bedroom is upstairs where it stays a bit warmer (heat rises) and we both prefer it a bit on the cool side when sleeping anyway. And the heat barely ran, if at all, overnight as our house is fairly well insulated. Turning on the heat was mostly to backstop the temperature in case it might get cold inside for whatever reason.

Just because overnight temps are dropping does not mean the days are getting chilly, though. Today will be a bit cool at only 70, but the forecast for the next week shows highs in the mid- to high 70s (24-26° C). Hooray for nice weather during the day... and cool enough nights to sleep under a sheet without sweating.

Alaska Travelog #16
At the hotel - Mon, 17 Jun 2024, 10am

The way it's light so late at night here in Alaska is kind of disorienting. Don't get me wrong; it was nice having twilight until 1am when we landed in Anchorage and drove to our hotel. And it's nice not worrying about about finishing our daytime activities outdoors before dark. We'll almost certainly run out of energy before the day runs out of daylight. But the sun not even starting to set until after 10pm throws off my sense of time. It's interesting to learn how many things are aligned to a kind of circadian rhythm. Like, I forget to eat dinner.

I forget to eat dinner. That's certainly not a sentence I ever thought I'd write! While some people I know easily forget to eat, when I haven't eaten in a while my body reminds me approximately every 3 minutes that food is delicious and would fill a void in my stomach. But here with sun not even dropping behind the mountains until 10pm, I've been like, "Woah, it's after 8pm already, I should get dinner!"

Unfortunately the choices for dinner in this small town of Seward are few. There are a handful of restaurants at the low end of the spectrum, dive-y type places serving small-town America staples like burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with your choice of barbecue sauce or ranch. Then there are high end, or at least high end-looking places with steak and seafood and prices that promise a tab of $50-70 per person after adding a drink, tax, and tip. We're not the spendy-dinner type of people, especially when traveling in small towns where all the food looks kind of suspect, so we've eaten at the dive-y joints. And that— not being disoriented by the sun— is why I've had pizza 4x in 36 hours.

No, I didn't buy pizza 4 times in 36 hours. I bought it two nights in a row for dinner. But each time there were leftovers. And since I have a thrifty streak from childhood I can't quite outgrow (and also the pizza wasn't disgusting) I ate the leftovers for breakfast both yesterday and today.

But hey, back to the midnight sun thing. You'd think that the flip side of midnight sun would be early morning sun. Like, blazing sun preventing sleep at 4am. Well, here in Seward, there's been morning fog. So yay being able to sleep in 'til a morning hour. But boo not being able to get out and enjoy the daylight right away.

Today we're planning to hike up to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Just like yesterday's cruise in the fjords started out with hours of heavy fog that left me uncertain we'd get to see anything, so too does today's fog make me reluctant to head into the park until I see evidence the clouds are starting to burn off. And here it is 10am already... which means the sun's been up— not that we can see it— for almost 6 hours! Well, it's a good thing there's another 13 hours of daylight left for us to go hiking later today. 🤣

The days are long. That's a fact that's been catching me by surprise, in little ways, pretty much every day this month.

One form of surprise is how the evening hours sneak up on me. More than once recently it's been after 7pm before I've even thought about having dinner. I've gotten involved in doing something, and the background process in my brain that reminds me of things like "dinnertime" by noticing the setting sun is off kilter. Or the sun is off kilter. Sunset isn't until 8:17pm today. And it'll get later for another month or so.

On the flip side, sun early in the morning interferes with my sleeping. At least every second or third day I wake up around 5am when the sky starts to get light. Sunrise isn't until just before 6am, but the sky starts brightening ahead of that. Sometimes the light in the sky jolts my circadian rhythms enough that I can't get back to sleep after waking up at 5 or 5:30am even though I'm desperately tired.

I've been taking it easy this weekend. I kind of need it after traveling overseas the previous three weekends. And I'll be traveling the next two weekends, too. Thus any thoughts I had a few days ago of, "Hey's let's drive out to ___ for a night or two this weekend!" were quickly dismissed.

I thought we might go hiking locally this weekend. Among the ideas we had was driving up to Sierra Vista Open Space, about 45 minutes away. That and other ideas fell by the wayside, though, as I was just too tired out to bother. Oh, and I'm in pain.

The pain is a back ache and, oddly, pain/weakness in my right arm. I've been dealing with them for a solid week now. At first I thought the backache was a muscular thing since it came at the tail end of the New Zealand trip, when I'd been popping ibuprofen on the regular from due to all the hiking. But that medicine didn't alleviate the pain, and the pain was joined by the thing in my arm, which also wasn't responsive to ibuprofen. Thus I concluded they were from a pinched nerve.

The backache has made it hard to sit for extended periods of time. Though oddly I only feel the pain when I stand up afterwards. And the arm pain has been accompanied by weakness. A few days ago I couldn't lift more than a few pounds without a bolt of pain. I've been dosing these pains all week now with acetaminophen. Thankfully they're slowly getting better. But they're not gone yet.

One "I did a thing!" task I set out to do today was clean the patio. The weather's getting nice enough that we'll want to sit outside more regularly. My inlaws are visiting in a few weeks, and it'll be nice to have the patio set up when they're here. And today is the last weekend day I'll have before then. So....



It's not that the patio was in terrible shape. We've got those dratted weeds growing out of the air vents on the far side, and quite a bit of dried leaves and other debris on the near side. I set to sweeping while Hawk grabbed gardening shears to deal with the weeds.

I thought I'd be okay in terms of pain with this modest task. Alas, I wasn't. Even just sweeping hurt my back enough that I had to stop and rest a few times, wincing at the pain. Thus we decided not to scrub the concrete. It doesn't look as dirty in real life as in these photos, anyway.



The sweeping tweaked my back enough that I wanted to lie down for a while afterward. Then we went grocery shopping. When we got back we had an early dinner— on the freshly cleaned patio.

It feels like Spring is here... and only 6 days early. Temperatures midday today are in the low 70s, with a forecast high of 74 F (about 23° C). Plus, it's sunny with mostly clear skies.

On the one hand it feels normal that the weather is only starting to turn nice in March. Last year we had a late spring, too. But many years around here the winter-like weather tapers off in February, with drier, sunnier, warmer days becoming common in March. There's got to be some value in living here where real estate is so expensive! 🤣

Today, December 21, is the winter solstice. In the northern hemisphere it's the shortest day of the year. Various cultures have, for thousands of years, marked the date scientifically and attached cultural significance to it. Typically the meaning involves the height of chill and darkness and the start of warmth and light returning. I attach to it the simple practical fact that it means the days will start getting longer now. I hate it being dark in the morning, dark again at 5pm, and pitch black by 7pm.

At least here in Silicon Valley, at latitude 37.4° N, the shortest day still provides 9.5 hours of daylight. ...Well, 9.5 hours of potential daylight. In the winter the sky here is typically overcast. We actually had a lot of partly-sunny and mild weather through November up to mid-December, before it turned cooler and rainy this week. But even so, the 9.5 hours of daylight here is better than in, say, Helsinki, Finland at just past 60° N latitude, where the day lasts not quite 6 hours. And tomorrow night we're leaving for Sydney, Australia, where it's not even winter. In fact they just had their summer solstice with daylight stretching nearly 14.5 hours. I'm looking forward to a midwinter week of summer!

We've had an easy weekend around home. Again. It's now our fourth in a row!

When we stayed home last weekend I wondered if I'd be itching to go somewhere this weekend. The answer turned out to be No— and for the same reason I wasn't antsy last weekend, either. I was/am glad to relax after a busy workweek.

In addition Hawk got her Covid shot and flu shot Friday afternoon. She was achy Saturday and Sunday, so it's good she didn't have any plans to go anywhere. ...Actually she had loose plans for lunches with friends and postponed those to stay home.

No-Sun Sunday

Crummy weather Sunday contributed to me wanting to stay home and lay around like a slug. It was gloomy and drizzling in the morning, then got sunny for a bit after lunch, then back to gloomy all afternoon. Though the temperature was pleasant it looked like winter outside, so I internalized "It's winter, stay inside."

The gloom and drizzle are a reminder that the seasons are changing. Last weekend's unusually warm weather was likely the last hurrah for summer-like temperatures. Now it's going to be more like winter than summer for the next several months.