Natterings From Nepantla

The SO's mother, who passed away in 2022, lived in La Cañada Flintridge, one of the communities up against the hills on the north side of the Los Angeles area. Every few years, when there was a fire up in the hills, we could easily check that she was in a safe area by seeing that the high school a couple blocks away from her house was listed as an emergency shelter. It's ironic to see that this time all of LCF has been evacuated.

(The SO still has other relatives living in SoCal, but they're all far away from the current fires. Hoping everyone I know down there remains safe.)

Our sun has been busy this week hurling gobs of plasma in this direction, meaning there will be aurorae visible tomorrow night as far south as Northern California. Usually the Portland area is scheduled for cloudy weather when there's something interesting going on in the sky, but this time the sky is going to be nice and clear.

I guess they probably won't be visible in suburban areas, though, and we might be distracted by other things. Here's an astronomer trying to sound reassuring:

Because of the intensity of the storms, it’s likely that disturbances of the Earth’s magnetic field will result in communication disruptions and possible power outages over the weekend, McKeegan said.

“Don’t be surprised if ... your favorite TV station isn’t working right or your cell phone isn’t working for a little while, but generally, things should recover pretty quickly,” he said. “It’s just Mother Nature reminding us who’s boss.”

While the rest of the country was being hit with blizzards of epic proportions, western Oregon was going through a perfectly normal weather pattern for around here, which goes like this:

1. Very cold, dry air builds up to the east and comes streaming down the Columbia Gorge, making it cold, dry, and windy.
2. Warm, moist air starts intruding from the west. Sometimes this means a little snow, but it quickly changes to freezing rain.
3. Nobody goes anywhere for a day or two because there is a layer of solid ice on everything, even vertical surfaces.
4. The rest of the warm air shows up, along with torrential rain and more winds, the ice melts all at once, localized flooding occurs.

Step 3 happened on Friday, which is garbage day in my neighborhood. With the roads still iffy Saturday morning and Sunday being Christmas, the garbage company apparently decided the heck with it and that it would just pick up twice the amount of trash at the regular time this week. Which meant that after all the loose branches lying around everywhere and the one complete tree that toppled over a couple doors away had all been cleared up, there were still trash cans sitting forlornly at the curb for days, and it's only today that we can say the storm cleanup is over.

Portland was under a high wind warning starting at 5pm yesterday. The forecasters were wrong; the wind actually picked up abruptly at 5:15. All our foliage survived fine, but on my walk this morning I came across this:



The wind is still blowing vigorously now, and the neighborhood is carpeted in leaves and small branches. The backyard ferals are unimpressed, though.

On the bright side, the wind plus some accident of topography has given this part of town a pocket of fresh air. It's the first time in several days that outdoors hasn't smelled faintly of smoke.