Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
Ahoy there, me hearty, ’tis “International Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Avast with that landlubber talk! Hoist up a dipper o’ the finest, strongest grog and drink it down wi’ a wannion, for when ye’re three sheets t’ the wind, ye’ll find it easy enough to belay that landlubber talk. By the Powers, ’tis great grand thing t’ have the the Jolly Roger flyin’ on the yardarm above while ye say “Shiver me timbers!” t’ the parrot perched on yer shoulder.
Arrrrrrr!
We have had a chilly summer. Of course, summer doesn’t really come to the Bay area until September; that’s when we get our hot days. But summer this year has been cool even by Bay area standards, with below normal high temperatures for June, July, and August.
This past week has been the first week that has felt like real summer. We still haven’t had any really hot days, but at least the high morning fog blowing in off the Pacific has burned off early enough to allow the days to warm up a little bit.
And just in time for summer, some of the trees are starting to turn. Some of the leaves on the trees across the street from us are beginning to curl up and turn yellow and brown. I drove by a sweet gum tree in Berkeley early this week that was completely red. And the trees around the parking lot at the church are beginning to be tinged with red.
My friend and fellow blogger E wrote a brief post on the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that hit Washington, D.C.: nothing was broken, the cats were scared, a few things fell. And as I started reading her post, sure enough Carol and felt a small magnitude 3.9 earthquake* here in San Mateo: there was a little bit of a noise, the house shook noticeably for about five seconds, and it was over. E ends her post by saying: “What a great reminder that we cannot change much of what happens, but we have a choice in how we behave in response.”
* Later downgraded to 3.6.
I had to drive up to San Francisco early this afternoon. When I left Palo Alto, it was sunny and warm. Heading north on highway 101, when I got to San Mateo I started seeing low clouds to the north. By the time I got to San Francisco, the sky was gray, and some people were driving with their headlights on.
In San Francisco, it was cloudy, damp, and down to 60 degrees, a good ten degrees cooler than it had been in Palo Alto, with a bracing northwest wind. You could sense the huge old mass of water in the Pacific Ocean just a few miles away.
At 4:30 I drove back to San Mateo along Interstate 280, around the Pacific Ocean side of San Bruno Mountain, and then up into the hills of the Coastal Range. Fingers of fog were creeping over the mountains, winding down through the tree-covered hills around Crystal Springs, but the sun evaporated them before they got very far.
When I arrived home in San Mateo, it was sunny and warm. But almost as soon as the sun set, the fog drifted over the Coastal Range, and became low clouds that now cover the sky above us. The temperature is down to 60 degrees, and outside it feels like it did in San Francisco this afternoon: cloudy, damp, and cool.
Mike Cassidy writes the “Silicon Valley Dispatches” column for the San Jose Mercury News. He is feeling a wee bit cynical these days. With unemployment still high, Cassidy is wondering how the recent federal deficit reduction actions by Congress are going to promote job creation by American corporations:
It’s not a lack of money that is holding companies back from hiring. Collectively, corporations for months have been sitting on record levels of cash, reaching about $1.9 trillion today. Remember the recent headlines about Apple (AAPL) having more cash than the U.S. government?
And profits are up widely. The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel was on the radio recently citing an analyst’s report that found that the first 100 of the S&P 500 to report quarterly earnings saw profit increases averaging 12 percent. Meantime, Wessel’s own paper was reporting on a new wave of layoffs at American companies.
So if you think further fattening corporate coffers with tax breaks will spur hiring, think again. — “Politicians and corporations are playing us for fools”
As someone who’s working in Silicon Valley, and as someone who knows a lot of people who are out of work or in danger of losing their jobs, I’m with Cassidy on this one. We have some of the richest companies in the world here in the Valley, and we saw 10.5% unemployment in June in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which means some 94,300 people classified as unemployed (that doesn’t count the underemployed, or the people who have given up looking for work).
Speaking as a minister, I wish Congress and the president and CEOs would realize this isn’t about getting political points or pleasing shareholders.
My older sister lives in Indiana. We were talking on the phone yesterday when she idly asked, “So how’s the weather out there?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Just so-so. The fog stayed in longer than usual in the morning so I don’t think it got above seventy-two degrees yesterday. And last night it was down in the fifties, so cold I had to close the window.”
“Augh!” she said, or at least she said something that might have been spelled that way. “I hate you! It’s been over ninety here for days, and it doesn’t get any cooler than about seventy-eight at night!”
That’s how to annoy someone from Indiana.
At my sister’s house,
Weeding her garden in bright
Fragrant summer heat.
The jet rises up,
Takes me to the distant shore
Where summer is cool.
At our house, gray fog
Drifts in from the cold ocean,
And is gone by noon.
A score of ten or better on this checklist is required for satisfactory completion of week-long stay on New England coast.
Walked along beach and picked up shells — check
Clambered over rocks on a jetty or breakwater — check
Ate fried clams (fresh, tender, and sweet, not the frozen crap you get inland) while sitting on beach — check
Sat in rocking chair on porch and looked at ocean — check
Got too much sun — check
Ate lobster roll (with identifiable claw meat, not that chopped up crap that you get inland) — check
Conversed in eastern New England dialect — check
Took afternoon naps — check
Got drenched in a sudden squall — check
Had weather cool enough to need a jacket, and hot enough to sweat while sitting still — check
Watched guys fishing for stripers and not catching anything — check
Watched seagulls and terns fishing and catching a lot — check
Moonrise over Camp Ellis, Maine
Dear Ms. M.,
Saw the moon come up over Saco Bay tonight. Sat on the beach and ate fried clams from Huot’s, and watched the moon change from pink to pale orange to gold.
Wish you were here,
Dan
I was coming back from a long walk down the beach to see if there were any Piping Plovers nesting at Goosefare Brook, looking down at my feet in the fading light to see if there were any interesting shells or stones worth picking up. Ahead of me, a man was aiming a camera with a large telephoto lens on a tripod at something. I looked in the direction his camera was pointed, and there was the moon rising up out of the Atlantic Ocean. If the moon is about 30 arcminutes wide, it was about 90 arcminutes above the surface of the ocean when I first looked. It was pink and a little brighter than the medium blue sky; it hung just above a distant line of darker blue clouds tipped with pink along their tops.
The moon sat in the sky above the gap between Eagle Island and Wood Island. As I walked on down the beach, past the man struggling to aim his camera, the moon appeared to move towards Wood Island, until it stood over the eastern end of the island. The last light of the sun lit up the distant white tower of Wood Island lighthouse; a long shimmering reflection of the moon shone in the waters of the bay.
A couple of hours later, I was on the beach with forty or fifty other people for a bridging ceremony for this year’s high school seniors in the youth program at the Ferry Beach religious education conference; these were youth I had watched grow up summer after summer; one of them was the daughter of someone who had been in my own high school youth group. The moon was high in the sky; a long white reflection of it brightened up the calm bay; it was almost bright enough to read by. The air was cool enough to require a jacket and to keep the mosquitoes away, and two foot waves crashed regularly on the beach below us. What a perfect night, said the person next to me.