Tag Archives: weather

The Passenger

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Amongst all the Christian saints that exist there really is only one that I really can identify with and believe in. That would be Saint Francis. I love the image of him in statuary, a monk in a garden with songbirds perched on his shoulders eating seeds out of his hands. There is something really quite gentle and special about someone of such faith being so kind as to attract and befriend animals. I’ve often said that how animals behave towards a person is one of the clearest indicators of what that person truly is. I think animals can sense the inherent goodness or lack thereof in human beings on some level that we are no longer a party to. If a dog avoids a person, perhaps there is a reason why, that sort of thing.

So, the saints are supposed to inspire the faithful to follow in their footsteps. I may not be a Christian, but I can appreciate the faith without getting hoovered into all it’s dogmatic thinking. Specifically speaking, this morning after I drove to work and parked my car in the parking lot in front of my building I looked at my rear-view mirror on the drivers side and noticed that I had a very tiny, very dangerous passenger who followed me to work, riding on my car. It was the business end of a yellowjacket. Apparently sometime during the night he struggled up to my side mirror and was trying to climb behind the mirror to get away from the chill in the air this morning as we had a light frost. I sat there for a minute or two and looked and he was not moving. So after I turned the car off I opened the door gently and closed it and blew a little stream of warm air at him to see if I could rouse him. He was alive. Very sluggish, but alive. He continued his trek to climb behind the mirror assembly and once he was there and safe I sat there talking to him. “I spared your life, so, when we meet again you won’t chase me and sting me, okay?” and I’d like to think that we’ve got a deal. Obviously bugs don’t speak english and you can’t make a deal like that with them, but a part of me did think that if there was some regard from nature that perhaps one good act, not stuffing a credit card into the slot to crush the bug but instead allowing him to seek refuge in my side mirror assembly might just be enough to earn me a “Get out of a yellowjacket sting” card from mother nature itself.

It’s a deal that I’ve made with all the creatures that surround me. If you are outside I will not kill you, but if you enter my home and you are either hazardous or frightful then your life is forfeit. This is specifically for the spiders that invade every spring and hide in the drains of the sink in my basement. They aren’t really hazardous to me, but to Scott they are little crawling chunks of pure nightmare and so, they die. The only thing I offer is that death is swift and complete, that there is a minimum of suffering. It may not be exactly Franciscan but it certainly beats dealing with a frightened partner gripping his chest trying to catch his breath.

I can only hope that the daily temperature rises enough, and the sun comes out. Once the sun hits the side of my car and that housing to the side mirror assembly, it should warm up in there quite quickly, as my car is a dark blue color and is apt to absorb heat than reflect it away. Perhaps when I get back out after quitting time I’ll check to see if my little yellowjacket friend got warm enough to fly away or if I have a lethal little buddy for the summer. I know that one yellowjacket is not lethal, in and of himself, but I have never been stung by any stinging insect so I always reserve a little latitude for them as I do not know for certain how my body will react to the toxins in their stings. It could just be an irritation or it could be anaphylactic shock. It’s really a toss of the dice and if you can avoid pissing off a stinging insect it’s in your best interest. Every time I see one I develop an intense case of the willies. I think it’s an instinctual response to avoiding the risk of a sting. Nothing makes me more keen to flee than the willies.

LJ – Jingle All The Damn Way

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From 02/11/2003

…A WINTER STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON…

This may become something of a treat for us, as if more snow on the ice we already have yields the feeling one would associate with the idea of “treat”. I don’t see any snow yet and I’m highly critical of our childlike weathercasters but we shall see if Kalamazoo is touched or more likely that Allegan is obliterated in a fog of dense blowing snow. I still maintain that Winter is the most romantic season, however I’ve noticed a distinct lack of monster pine trees, as everything around here is Oak and Maple and therefore skeletonized and totally dreary. If you listen very closely you can make out the happy tunes of “White Christmas” being played over and over again to an audience that is howling in agony. ‘Tis the season. 🙂

Comic Tent Flapping

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I’ve signed up for The Weather Channel’s “Notify” service. This is supposed to alert me when there is a meteorological emergency and I use it mostly for thunderstorms as power outages can cause havoc with my systems at work.

Mostly the service runs great, and always alerts me when there is some sort of emergency. The problem is that it alerts me too well. In alert management I believe it’s called tent flapping. The alert spawns a thick group of alerting emails and phone calls. Each alert throws off two calls, and about four emails. It’s always comic when there is an alert as every device I own beeps, vibrates, or rings.

At least I can’t say that I wasn’t alerted. 🙂

Frozen Oranges

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I smile when I see reports of 36 degrees in Miami Florida. My pleasure is manifold, first hit is on the smug southerners who pridefully proclaim that “It never gets that cold here! Nyah Nyah!”, well, now it does. The second pleasure is for the snowbirds, you seriously thought you could outrun it?

The main pleasure comes in a kind of satisfaction regarding climate change. Sure, global warming is definitely a chapter title in this book we’re currently reading out of, but this is just a mild little precursor, a microscopic fluctuation, the prologue so to speak. As the climate changes, the weather patterns will change. Global warming is coming and it’s making some places warmer and other places colder. This year is an El Nino year, with the North American weather pattern being dictated by the blotch of warm Pacific Ocean water and I believe it to be the principal driving factor behind this years minty-fresh winter. Even with El Nino, you can’t easily dismiss a low-temperature record that was broken since 1927. It may be El Nino, but you can almost catch a whiff of something else out there, a little something extra riding on top of the natural variation. Only time will tell what global warming will do to the North American weather pattern. Maybe it will make everything stronger – hotter summers and colder winters, or maybe instead it will muck about with the seasons, Spring and Fall starting and stopping at different times.

On Facebook I mused that our planet is in a constant state of trying to find the perfect balance. I don’t see anything that disproves that idea. There is something deeply satisfying however in the notion that humanity, through it’s own shortsightedness and resistance to change forced our own planet to seek out a new balance, one that doesn’t have our desires in mind. A kind of species schadenfreude, and the joke is only now starting to unfold. True hilarity will take another hundred years to suss out, to quote a favorite movie, “This is all far from over…”