Second Day of the New Year
The first day of our New Year was a lot of fun – we had little Q overnight, so after breakfast he and I walked to a near by park while AdventureMan cooked up a big pot of Turkey Gumbo, accompanied by a salad that had apples and cranberries and a fabulous Roquefort dressing, our son and his wife came for lunch and picked up their son, and then we had a free afternoon. I started a new quilt, a complicated quilt, one that takes a lot of planning and a lot of cutting before I can even stitch the very first piece.
Then last night we watched District 9, a movie we had seen before. I always find it troubling, and I know I shouldn’t watch a movie like that which stirs me up, before I go to bed.
So today is the first normal day of the new year, I hit the pool for aqua aerobics and then I come home to do some more cutting for the quilt. I’ve been cutting all day. I still have more cutting to do. Aarrgh.
The good news is – it is my choice. I want to do more quilts, I want to make time. I want to do all the small work that goes into a truly grand quilt. It’s just tedious when you are in the middle of the preparation stages, and the light today is not bright, it is dark.
Maybe better light tomorrow. I am working with wonderful colors; colors of the desert and colors of the Arabian Gulf. 🙂
50 Amazing Weather Photos from 2012
I’m kind of a weather nerd. It goes with liking Geography, and maps, and navigation, I guess. You can see a series of truly amazing photos at SKYE for AOL.
Here is one of my favorite photos – a long time ago, I lived in Heidelberg, and I can remember the Neckar river freezing, but not this hard.
Here is another, taken in Florida, called Fire Rainbow. I have never seen this kind of reflection, but oh . . . I would love to see it!
It’s an amazing series of photos, taken round the world, of weather related phenomena. Go see for yourself.
Gemenid Meteor Showers Peak Tonight!
I found this on BBC News; if where you live is as cold – or colder – that Pensacola, you will need to bundle up in a heavy down sleeping bag while you “relax and enjoy the view.”
The annual Geminids meteor shower will reach its peak late on Thursday night and into early Friday morning.
The meteors will appear to radiate from a point near the star Castor, in the constellation Gemini.
In the Northern hemisphere, that will be westward and nearly overhead in the early hours of Friday.
Sky watchers can expect an average of dozens of “shooting stars” per hour, made easier to see by darkness provided by the “new moon” phase.
The shower comes about each year as the Earth passes through the path of an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon.
The asteroid leaves behind a trail of rocky debris that the Earth ploughs into each year – debris moving at 35km per second that burns up in the atmosphere in what can be spectacular displays.
According to the International Meteor Organization, the “radiant” – the apparent point from which the meteors seem to come – will be visible from sunset in high northern latitudes, rising at about midnight local time in the southern hemisphere.
“For those old enough or tough enough to stay up until two in the morning, then the radiant point [in the Northern hemisphere] is almost overhead so you could basically look anywhere and see them,” Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society told BBC News. “Go outside, wrap up well, get yourself into a comfortable chair, relax, and enjoy the view.
“It could be 30 [meteors] an hour, it could be 100 an hour. But those are only average figures there maybe a period of 10 minutes that you don’t see anything but equally there may be a period of 10 minutes when you see 30.”
The Geminids are less well-known relative to other annual meteoric performances such as the Perseids, in part because December weather often threatens a clear view of the show.
For the UK that may again be case; BBC Weather reports that southern Scotland and the North of England will have clearest conditions into Friday morning but conditions will tend toward cloudy and windy across the UK through the night.
Tant de Brouillard – Foggy Morn in Pensacola
I learned a new word today, le brouillard, from a blogger who liked my Pensacola parade post. I always take a look to see, and this time, it was like taking a brief vacation to a place I love – the villages of France, and the morning market, or marche. His blog is My French Heaven, and he writes in French and English, good exercise for those of us who need to polish up our language skills. Warning: the photos on his blog are EXPLICIT. You will want to eat those oysters, vegetables and sweets right off the page.
He was waiting, this morning, for ‘le brouillard se dissipe’ and I smiled because on my way home from the early service this morning, I had to stop and take some photos of foggy Pensacola and the foggy bayou:
If, in the midst of this crazy time of the year, you can give yourself a small gift and a short virtual vacation, take a moment to have a cup of green tea and visit my friend Stephane at My French Heaven.
Great Weather for the Pensacola Christmas Parade
The weather in Pensacola is crazy right now, after a couple months of cooling temperatures, we are up in the 70’s during the days and down in the 60’s at night, maybe the 50’s – it is so warm that our aloe is blossoming, she thinks it is spring.
The good news is that the Pensacola Christmas Parade is tomorrow night, and it looks like it will be a balmy evening with NO RAIN! We are looking forward to taking our grandson – this will be his third Christmas Parade, but this is the first time he is really walking and talking, and we think the sound and lights (it always starts with the motorcycle police and the fire engines blasting and all their emergency lights spinning) are going to blow him away. This year he will be able to shout “beads! beads!” and scramble with the other kids for beads and candies; the parade is a wild mix of Christmas and Mardi Gras. It is a hilarious experience, and we are eager to see it through his eyes.
“Do You Think You Would Move To Seattle?”
“If anything happened to me, do you think you would move to Seattle?” AdventureMan asked, knowing the heat and long humid summers in Pensacola are hard on me. What are the clues? Maybe my grumbling and complaining, maybe that I won’t walk in the garden with him because of the heat and humidity, the snakes, the mosquitoes, the red ants, LOL.
I really love Seattle. I love it that women of all ages can wear jeans and look comfortable in their own skin. So many of those stoic Scandinavian women don’t even bother with make-up anymore, so secure are they. They don’t color their hair. They are comfortable to be exactly who they are. They walk. They are like the French; they get their exercise in their daily life by walking and keeping active. They read books and discuss them. They make interesting political choices. Yes, I really like Seattle.
On the other hand . . . this is one of only two times I saw the sun when I was in Seattle:
It rained. Sometimes it rained more lightly, sometimes it drizzled, and now and then it poured. It rained particularly hard and cold one night as I was trying to get my Mom into a restaurant and we had to park far away. And here is the weather forecast for Seattle today from Weather Underground:
Weather Underground Forecast for Tuesday, December 04, 2012. Another strong Pacific storm will slam into the West Coast Tuesday, renewing rain and high elevation snow for areas that were hit hard by three storms in the past week. This storm will be slightly farther north than the previous storms, bringing areas of heavy rain and high elevation snow from Washington through the San Francisco Bay Area. The heaviest precipitation is expected to fall in Washington and Oregon, but heavy rain is possible in the far northern part of California.
Pensacola is truly lovely from October to March . . . yesterday was in the 70’s. It was wonderful to see the sun 🙂
Brrrrrrrrrr . . .
It’s COLD this morning, 42°F, 5°C, and I have donned my long pink flannel nightgown. I grew up in flannel nightgowns, which are not very attractive, but they are nice and warm. When they are brand new, they are too hot, my current one is about half-old, and I have one that I know I need to part with – it is so thin it tears at the slightest encouragement – but I love them when they get old and thin, LOL!
Once I make the leap to scrap one of these trusty flannel nightgowns, they are great for polishing silver. I know, I know, who polishes silver anymore? My sister Big Diamond says she puts her silver in the dishwasher, and uses it every day because people just don’t entertain formally as we once did.
Living in a place that’s warm most of the time, my flannel nightgowns don’t get a lot of wear and are lasting a lot longer than they used to. Ditto all my beautiful winter clothes. Vanity, vanity, I spent money of beautiful wools in Germany, Austria and England for hard winters back in Edmonds, WA, and now I have a closet full of beautiful winter clothes that I rarely get a chance to wear. Today, I can pull out an old friend and wear it!
Fairbanks, Alaska or Brazil
I would have loved to be able to actually watch and see when the actual 2 millionth visitor visited, but as it does, life got in the way. There were things that needed doing, people that needed time and attention, and I by the time I got back to check, I had already gone over.
Using StatCounter, I was able to go back 78 people and figure out that it was either the visitor from Brasil or a visitor from Fairbanks, Alaska.
A couple times, I have thought I would quit blogging, like when I hit 5 years, then six, or maybe when I hit 2 million hits . . . Now, I don’t know. There are times when it is hard to get inspired, hard to think of anything I might have to say that you might find interesting, too.
I have a little trick. When I am stumped, I think of our aqua aerobics group in Doha, Qatar. We weren’t very serious, but we were very committed. We had to show up because the others counted on us. Our motto was “any exercise is better than no exercise” and on very cold days in January, exercise counted as sitting in the hot tub and kicking. We talked to pass the time, and not to think about exercising. We talked about books we had read, dishes we had cooked, movies we have seen, and events in the news. So when I can’t think of anything much to say, I think about my friends, the Aqua Babes (LOL!) and I can usually come up with something.
A long time ago, in Kuwait, there was a blogger called (something) Red, I followed, and she thought about quitting and asked us to give her reasons why or why not. I remember writing that we blog because it’s what we do, we write because it is something in us that needs to be written. Until I wrote that to her, I didn’t even know that I thought that. I guess that is why I keep on, because there is something in me that needs to do what I am doing, and when I don’t need to do it, I will stop.
First Winter Weather Coming
From Weather Underground:
AdventureMan will be pulling out his long underwear, LOL!
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