7th October
On Saturday I went out and bought some more scuba gear. Today we went diving off Solana beach to test it all out. The visibility wasn't very good but there were lots of fish around. And it's lobster season so there were lobster pots to look at as well, some with very large and grumpy-looking lobsters in them.
This is Luke's gear, not mine.
I think that I attached the regulator the wrong way round on the first attempt. Ooops.
14th October
I flew east on Wednesday to visit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is on the coast not far from Boston. The rest of my group were already out there, getting ready to deploy a set of sensors in the ocean a few miles offshore. When I arrived, I was told that the project had all been cancelled at the last minute because of an adminstrative error somewhere far above the heads of the academics. Boo hiss. We're still here until Tuesday though and it's actually been really nice to have peace and quiet and real weather (rain and clouds and autumn) in order to get some reading and writing done. So there aren't as many exciting pictures as I'd have hoped to have, but never mind.
Here are some of the bits of our experiment and some other people's experiments as well.
Proper weather (with rain and gloom) and pretty sunsets
me with a WHOI ship in the background
Favourite word of the week: RUSTICLE
They're even real, look here.
And I also found a word for that thing when you know that you know a word, but you can't remember what it is. Unfortunately, I can't just remember what the word is...
22nd October, 2007
There is smoke. Lots of it. This smoke consists of lots of things that were San Diego and are now making an aerial bid for freedom, having suffered the odd bit of oxidation en route. I took these pictures last night - the smoke had drifted out west to the ocean and then south parallel to the coast, obscuring the sun and making the waves very pretty. The sun has been bright red for much of the day today and when I left work (not that much actual work got done) there was so much smoke that you almost couldn't see the ocean. The ocean (for those who don't know this) is only 200 m down the hill from my office. The fires are mostly a few miles north of here, and although my house is perfectly safe, lots and lots of people that I know are being evacuated. I've been listening to the radio all day as they extend the areas where evacuation is mandatory, and more and more stories of the hundreds of lost homes have been broadcast.
I won't be going to work tomorrow, I don't think - the smoke is worse there, even though it's only a few miles further north. I'm sure that while I've been rushing around for the past few weeks, I've thought of loads of useful little things that I could do around the house, but now that I'm faced with time and a radio to listen to I can't think of any of them.
The weather was completely clear - there is no cloud. It's all smoke. And as you can see, it was more than an hour before sunset, but the sun was completely obscured only a short time after this.
Tuesday, October 23rd
I just went up Mount Soledad, the hill just behind where I live which has a 360 degree field of view from the top. Here are some of the pictures that I took... it's not very photogenic because it's mostly grey smoke but the weather is perfectly clear and sunny - the grey stuff really is all smoke.
These are all looking north. The fires are about 10 miles away in that direction.
29th October
The smoke has cleared and it's mostly all back to normal. Here's a NOAA satellite picture of the smoke from the middle of last week.
Hallowe'en is getting going with some enthusiasm round here. At the weekend we went to a "haunted hotel", which was actually very good. I had never heard of things like that before, but it was pretty entertaining. It was all in a dark basement with actors and lots of convincing sets and props.
And we also took Sisuuk (Luke's dog) for a frolic along the beach, so here are some pictures of that.
Luke and his dog. He was taking the pictures while I was running around, which is why most of them are of me.
