December 1, 2005

• the weather in space, and the culture out here

  This animation shows sunspot 826, which in just one day has grown from
  a barely visible speck to a sprawling trail of spots wider than the
  rings of Saturn.

  

  spaceweather.com
  recommends that astronomers with safely filtered solar telescopes watch
  this one, as it changes from moment to moment.  It is crackling
  with little C-class flares and has issued one medium-sized
  M-flare.  The email alert to this one described that trail of
  spots as a crack in the solar corona.

  ---

  I was horribly remiss this morning, going off up the Talkeetna Road
  without my camera.  I left before sunrise, half asleep and with no
  blood sugar, to get lab work done at the clinic.  Stops at the
  clinic, at the Store (AKA Gee-Haw Supply [gee and haw are directions
  farmers down south give to their mules and mushers up north give to
  their dogs]), and at Sunshine Restaurant, would have provided more views
  of our rustic and not-so-rustic local architecture, and at least three
  roadside stops would have shown peachy-colored sunrise light on trees
  and mountains.  Too bad for you, all the pictures are in my head.

  While waiting to be seen in the lab, I read today’s Anchorage Daily
  News.  There’s a story on the front page of the Alaska section
  about two men found yesterday, in separate incidents, frozen to death
  here in the Mat-Su Valley, both in the Wasilla area near where Greyfox
  lives.  One of them was found in the snow, barefoot, outside his
  apartment just around a curve in the highway from Felony Flats. 
  He had been drinking.  The other one was found in a bus he lived
  in.  The bus lacked insulation and was full of holes.  He had
  run out of fuel for his main heat source and was relying on an electric
  heater.  A friend who had been drinking there with him called
  police when he couldn’t rouse the man.  When Troopers arrived the
  indoor temperature was minus thirteen degrees. (full story here)  There but for the grace of God and his own good sense and vigilance, goes my beloved Old Fart.

  Having skipped both last night’s late snack and this morning’s
  breakfast, I stopped at Sunshine on the way home for a Spanish
  omelet.  Servings there are the typically-Alaskan double
  portions.  Hash brown potatoes were literally hanging off the
  edges of the platters the waitress served.  One man at a nearby
  table looked at his and said, “Do you think it’s enough?”  The
  waitress understood the irony (or sarcasm) and said they have boxes to
  go.  He said the problem was he’d probably eat it all.  I
  brought half of mine back to eat later.

  I took a seat at a table next to one where a couple appeared to be just
  finishing up their meals, with my back to them and facing the windows
  up front.  As I took off my coat, I overheard the woman say in a
  stressed-out voice, “All I wanted to do was enjoy my breakfast, and now
  there’s all this PRESSURE!”  The
  man murmured something quietly, and the only word I caught was,
  “pressure.”  I ordered my breakfast and sat there drinking coffee
  and unabashedly listening to their conversation, as one can only really
  do when one’s back is to the eavesdroppees.

  My guess is that he is her ex-, either boyfriend or spouse.  There
  was a sense of familiarity without any present intimacy.  I saw no
  physical familial resemblance, and got no real feel of a sibling
  relationship, either.  She was asking him for financial
  help.  He kept trying to finish her sentences when she faltered,
  and getting it wrong so she’d have to correct his assumptions.  It
  turned out she wanted a short-term loan to buy a larger propane heater
  because she is almost out of oil, heating oil prices have risen
  sharply, and to get a good deal she’d need to buy at least a hundred
  gallons, and won’t be able to do that until her next unemployment check
  in two weeks.

  She shot down all his alternative suggestions such as buying a wood
  stove, and gave him more reasons than I would have felt necessary given
  the established fact that he and his current partner, Lucy, had offered
  financial aid to her before.  Finally, in a voice so dripping with
  sarcasm that I could read it without seeing her face, she listed a
  couple of options that would be acceptable to her and then said, “or I
  could move in with you and Lucy for a week.”  He paused, and then
  incredibly started verbally working out just how that might be made to
  work out.  She broke in and said, “I was kidding.”  He, poor
  schnook, groaned and confessed that he never knew when anyone was
  kidding.  “Lucy,” he said, “tells me that she needs a big sign she
  can wave at me, saying, ‘JOKE’.”

  After they left, I turned my attention to the man who had been joshing
  the waitress about the oversize portions, and his morbidly obese
  companion.  The fat guy’s feet got my attention first. 
  Unaccountably, he was wearing city shoes, shined leather-soled
  loafers.  Otherwise he was dressed like any normal
  valley-rat.  I was sorta looking forward to watching him try to
  waddle across the icy parking lot in them, but they were still eating
  and discussing their investment portfolios when I left.  It’s
  probably just as well.  He was so red-faced he could have been
  wearing a flashing neon sign saying, “critical hypertension.”  A
  pratfall in the parking lot might be good for a laugh, but even I don’t
  think a heart attack on ice is funny.

  Before they got into the talk of stocks, bonds and money market funds,
  the other man was talking about his son-in-law.  That guy, by the
  way, was wearing big oversized Sorel pac boots, the kind rated to minus
  eighty degrees.  I have a pair of them I wear only when I’m
  walking somewhere in the coldest of weather.  I can’t drive in
  them because one boot covers both brake and clutch or gas and brake
  pedals.  Maybe this is why the fat guy was wearing loafers. 
  He might have been the designated driver.  Anyway, I was telling
  about the man’s son-in-law – this guy says the man his daughter married
  is “bright, talented…” and I heard the “but” coming.

  The son-in-law, it seems, is an artist with, according to his FIL, “the
  ambition of a board.”  I’m sure he didn’t mean a board of
  directors.  He went on to explain that his daughter had married a
  Native Alaskan.  The kid had been adopted and raised by a white
  family, but he still had that “Indian state of mind.”  His art
  pays him a bit now and then, and he has occasional payouts from his
  regional Native corporation, “fifty thousand one time, twenty-five thou
  another, so the kid thinks he’s got all he needs…” the FIL says,
  shaking his head with a wry smile.  Thinking how fortunate that
  young woman is to be living with a guy who is creative and easy-going,
  not a wannabe anything, I stifled a laugh and hid my grin behind my
  coffee cup, because the speaker that time was facing me and it’s even
  ruder to be seen to be eavesdropping than it is just to eavesdrop.
  

  • 6:12 pm
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