KJ

If you saw any pictures of weird, orange or red skies out of the US West Coast yesterday, I'm here to assure you that they were not filtered or exaggerated in any way.

This was the view up through my skylight at noon yesterday, September 9th.

It lightened up a bit in the afternoon, but it was never any brighter inside than late twilight, and it was surreal and weird and I hated it.

This morning, things look much more normal. The light is pretty yellowish, but at least it's enough to see by. I'd compare it to just before a heavy storm -- not bright, but I don't feel the need to turn on all the lights. The tradeoff is that air quality is notably worse, but frankly I will take it. My brain has a model for dealing with this. It can't quite cope with a day where the sun never rose.

Our first storm of the season has come in with a vengeance -- heavy rainfall off and on, high winds through at least tomorrow afternoon. It hit late this afternoon after threatening all day, just in time to make everyone's evening commute much more interesting than it needed to be. Tomorrow morning should also be exciting. I do need to go into the office for at least part of the day, but I hope to get out early because we still have some Thanksgiving shopping to do.

Rain is not typically my favorite weather, but today I'm glad to see it. Usually we get at least some rain in late October and earlier in November, but there's been basically none this fall so far. We seem to be making up for lost time now -- my weather app suggests that the next storm system will arrive on Saturday and hang around for at least a week. Winter, it would seem, has arrived.

1. After a few days off, the rain is back today. Perhaps this means winter is finally upon us? We can only hope.

2. The downside of rain: potholes. There's a section of Highway 101 that basically disintegrates every time we get heavy rain (between Mid-Stick and SFO, for those of you who might be familiar with the area), but this is a level up. That stretch of road is on my commute to work; there is, in fact, an excellent chance that I drove over this stretch of pavement earlier today. Today in reasons I'm glad we didn't repeal the gas tax....

3. Normally work would be winding down for the holidays about now, but thanks to my main project and a few other things, I'm as busy as I've ever been. And next week I'm out of town for a meeting in Long Beach.

4. Still, today I let my project team know that I'm planning to be out the entire week between Christmas and New Year. It's fairly ridiculous that any office expects people to work during that time. When I worked for a dotcom, we got that whole week off without pay. Much more civilized.

5. On Sunday, I went to a craft fair and got a couple of necklaces, some soap, a couple of gifts, and this adorable owl laptop sticker. I can already tell it will make me smile for much time to come.

The wind picked up and our local air is finally better, hooray! We also bought an upgraded air filter for the furnace, then let it run on the fan setting for several hours, and that seems to have helped. Still, I'm glad that it supposed to start raining soon (late Tuesday night in the current forecast).

In part to get into a cleaner air environment, and in part because I've been curious to see it, T and I went to see Widows. It was a really good movie, but it was a lot darker than I was expecting. This is not a light, fun heist caper -- it's a violent and thrilling crime film, with twists and turns and real scares and lots of awful, awful people, and you will probably walk out wanting to ban all men. But I'm still very glad I saw it. The acting is stellar, from an amazing ensemble. Definitely worth seeing in a theater, if you're at all interested.

One quick content warning: there is a very cute dog in the movie, and the dog is occasionally in danger. ( Not a significant spoiler but in case you need to know. )

The first really big storm of the season is upon us. It's supposed to rain really hard overnight, then taper off well into tomorrow.

After so many years of drought, it's always a bit of relief to hear rain on the roof, even though we got so much rain last year that most of California is officially out of drought conditions. Like many of our storms last year, this one is a so-called Pineapple Express, which refers to a stream of wet air that blows quickly up from Hawaii to the Pacific Coast of North America. Usually, especially in the winter, the jet stream and ocean currents come from the Arctic, which is why the Pacific Ocean is so cold here, and why it's often cold when it rains. But a Pineapple Express is a tropical storm, and so it's both warmer and wetter than usual.

I'll take the warmer for sure, and for now I'll also take the wetter. As long as I can mostly be inside while it's happening.

Today is my single day off in a marathon concert week (we even had an extra rehearsal on Sunday night). There's only one performance, on Friday night. I have mixed feelings about single shows -- it's nice that I don't lose my entire weekend, but there's way more pressure to be perfect because we don't have another shot at it. One of the pieces is fiendishly difficult, but I found in last night's dress rehearsal that I know it better than I thought I did. As is usually the case. I wish we had another week or so to work on it, but I think we'll do fine.

Meanwhile we are having a heat wave, and it is glorious. I know many of my fellow San Franciscans are melting, but I am so happy. You people who enjoy your cold and your fog get your preferred weather 80% of the year; let me have this moment of cozy warm glory. ;) It's supposed to break tomorrow or Friday, so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

The Agents of SHIELD finale was last night, and overall I am pleased. The season had its bumps and its low points, but as a first crack at cross-platform storytelling, I don't think they did too badly. I think I have a larger post brewing on this. Watch this space.

Good progress on DOINK! today. I am inching toward an ending. Let's see if I can get it there.

Today is the first real rain of the season -- we've had some drizzles and sprinkles here and there, but this is the first day that it's just outright rained, from sometime last night right through until now. Unfortunately, first rain means slow traffic and accidents and transportation snafus, not to mention discovering that my windshield wipers are truly shot, with a resulting detour to the auto parts store, so all my brilliant plans to spend the day out and writing (working on meta projects and fic, catching up on online reading where I've fallen behind) were pretty much shot.

Instead, I'm snatching a few minutes at a cafe not far from the rehearsal hall -- my call is in just over an hour -- with a Cafe Borgia (picture a mocha with orange) and the Internet and the Soundtrack from Braid. Maybe I'll get a little writing in, maybe I'll have to do it when I get home, but at least these next few minutes will be mine.

I regret to inform you that Punxsutawney Phil, groundhog extraordinaire, saw his shadow this morning, thereby predicting six more weeks of winter. 

However, his was a minority opinion, so perhaps we have a chance of early spring after all. 

Happy Groundhog Day!

taricalmcacil asked about weather and how it affects my moods.

I love warm weather. Always have. Even in muggy Iowa, summer was always my favorite season and winter was my least favorite. Given a choice between being too hot and too cold, I will pick too hot, every time. I know what everyone says about how you can bundle up against cold, whereas there isn't much you can do about heat, but a. I resent having to bundle up and b. it doesn't completely work anyway, because I don't care how many hats and sweaters and scarves and pairs of long underwear I have on -- if it's below freezing, my nose is still going to get cold.

So never assume it's an accident that I settled in Northern California, the land of moderate weather. I spent my childhood and college years in lands of temperature extremes, and now I am done, thank you. Besides, one of the great things about California is the number of other climates that are in easy reach. Tired of the chilly, foggy summer? Head up to the North Bay or out to the Central Valley to bake in some heat. Want to see some snow? Drive to the mountains for the day. And then, when I'm done, I can come home, where it's cool enough to sleep at night and I never have to worry about breaking out the salt or the snow shovel.

Still, I do love a good heat wave. I relax in hot weather, basking like a lizard on a rock. You will almost never see me more content than during a 90-degree day in San Francisco. Perhaps they're all the more pleasing because of their rarity -- we get maybe a dozen, during a good year, spread out from March through October. A solid week of hot weather is almost unheard of. They come in glorious bursts of a day or two; the fog will always return, driving the warm weather to Central Valley where it normally resides.

Sometimes I like rain, too, especially if I don't have to go anywhere. The sound of rain on a roof is soothing to me, watching the droplets on the windows almost hypnotic. Rain is my favorite kind of writing weather. I can appreciate the power of a good storm, too. We don't get summer storms in California -- if it is raining, it's almost invariably chilly -- and I do miss those: the smell of warm wet pavement, the crack of thunder and lightning, the way it clears out the air for hours afterwards.

But taken too far, clouds and fog will get me down. More than two or three days of rain in a row, or the relentless overcast, foggy days we often get in July and August will make me restless and lethargic, especially if it's also cold. I eventually get tired of the winter rains, too; one year, I think 2007, we had something like 50 days of rain in two months. Always before that winter, I had considered whether I might be able to stand the climate in Portland or Seattle. Turns out no, not so much.

And then there is my least favorite weather phenomenon: wind. Wind is cold, and it is annoying -- I hate what it does to my hair, I hate how it makes it impossible to use an umbrella in the rain, I hate how it makes everything colder. Unfortunately, San Francisco is the real windy city; wind and rain invariably come together here, and we get a daily wind storm a couple of hours before sunset, most days (something to do with the interaction of the land and the ocean, and changing temperatures between them). I'm not talking about a little light breeze, either. One of my least favorite things about living here. That, and I might bump the average annual temperature up about 5 degrees.

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

Home from San Diego, catching up on the Internet -- reading from the phone just isn't the same, does anyone know of an iPhone app that will post to DW? I have stuff to say about this trip, and at least two meme posts to catch up on (Top Fives, and a one-sentence fic meme that I played with over the weekend and still need to finish), but for now I am happy to be in my house with my kitties, and NO ANTS. My mother-in-law has ants. I better have gotten them all out of my bag.

Also, the fog appears to be gone! I got home just in time.