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Sunday, January 14, 2007

Westward Ho! (part 3)

Dear Michael,

As we departed our Topeka motel with fearless driver Patrick manning the truck, we all realized that today would be the last day of our journey into the golden west. We’d been watching the weather channel each night, and now examined the grasslands closely for the promised signs of snow. On and on we drove through the endless prairies , livened only by the occasional oil well drilling into the earth with its proboscus driving into the flesh of the earth like a giant mosquito. Aha! Near Abilene (birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to the informative billboards) we started to see patches of snow on the northward slopes around the road. The snow gradually became more extensive, until about 100 mi from the Colorado border the snow was continuous, covering the corn stubble in the farms to either side. We stopped at a Starbucks surrounded by oddly situated pseudo palms in the snow.

The wind gusted enough to make the truck steering a little dicey. At one point we slowed to a crawl seeing cars strewed in random directions on the road. There had been ground blizzards, and ice on the road made a couple of cars spin out of control, one in the median strip gully, and the other in the ditch to the right. Luckily for them, some kind soul in a pickup was using a chain to drag cars back onto the road. By the time we left Kansas at the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign the road was clear, but the wind continued to gust.

Unknown to us, roads into Boulder were beginning to be closed due to high winds. At about the time we hit the Denver-Boulder turnpike, I 25 was closed between Denver and Fort Collins due to ground blizzards. Colo. 119 between Golden and Boulder was closed, as was the Longmont-Boulder “diagonal” highway. Blissfully ignorant of this, we tooled into Boulder onto the Foothills Parkway, turned East on Valmont road, and a few minutes later we were parking the car at Edison and Galileo streets opposite our Darwin Ct home. We’d been hearing about the 48 in of snow Boulder had had over the past 3 weeks. It was too dark to see, but maybe in the morning we’d see some big drifts.

Using the keys that our friend Fred Thrall had been keeping for us, we hauled in our foam pads, blankets and sleeping bags, and hit the hay. That night the banshees woke us up with their howls. Through the skylights over our bed we could see the bare limbs of trees swinging around, but no wind damage was done in our neighborhood. The wind speed got up to 115 mph , so it was a true “Chinook” (a down-slope over 90 mph). The next day dawned clear and warm, a perfect day for unloading the truck (that doesn’t look like 48 in of snow!) . Elsewhere in the Boulder area, some home and cars had been damaged by flying debris, but we saw no obvious damage ourselves. Patrick drove up to Lake Eldora ski area for a few hours of well-earned snow boarding. Our skier friends, Chuck & Esther, said that Eldora probably has the best snow in Colorado right now. Considering the poor snow in the East and in Europe, it may be the best snow in the world!

By early afternoon, with the help of Boulder friends and a couple of hired kids, we filled the house with boxes. In the coming weeks it would be like Christmas every day, with hundreds of boxes containing only dimly guessed stuff which we can open at our leisure, being surprised over and over again.

rakkity & the Mrs

We won’t get a phone until 8 am, Jan 15 (303 449 2125). DSL will be available from 5 pm (we hope).

Gallery

posted by michael at 4:21 am  

14 Comments »

  1. Welcome home.
    And thanks for the travelogue.

    Comment by anon — January 14, 2007 @ 11:38 am

  2. Congrats on your whole new life. Very brave. Into cold winds no less. You seem delighted in your truck. I hope you enjoy your new home and your new state very much. Is Patrick driving or flying back?

    Comment by La Rad — January 14, 2007 @ 1:02 pm

  3. That Patrick headed right off to snowboard after finishing unpacking speaks volumes. I second anon — thanks for carrying us on your journey, and welcome home! Sounds like you’re all right where you wanna be … !

    Comment by adam — January 14, 2007 @ 1:52 pm

  4. Patrick flew home, leaving his extra gloves with me, which I’ve used a few times since (Thanks, Patrick!)

    Today was warmer (15 F) and snowier. The flakes are the size of quarters and drift down like autumn leaves. The sun shines weakly through the hazy sky like a mid day full moon. This afternoon as I XC skiied up the Mt Sanitas Valley trail, I met joggers, snowshoers, other skiers, and dog walkers. They all agreed, “Isn’t this a beautiful day?”

    Since we arrived, we’ve gone to a free film, a lecture about melting Greenland, a piano quartet, and a slideshow about Alaska. In between shopping for a couch, and car-slaloming through Boulder streets.

    Comment by rakkity — January 14, 2007 @ 7:59 pm

  5. Hey, Rakkity — I’ve got a question. (Nothing to do with this particular entry, although you would be forgiven for thinking it does, given the title of the entry.) I’m sort of in the middle of a unit about the solar system. [Mostly I focus on the sun/moon/earth relationships to try and get students to really understand the seasons and the lunar cycle(s) by utilizing some unusual methods I’ve invented, but we’re moving on to other things next week.] A worksheet from the book asks (based on sunspot information) “Which direction does the sun rotate?” and they put a little compass rose near the pictures of the sun so that students would say “West to East” even if they didn’t know to Never Eat Soggy Wheat. Now, I’ve believed for a while that East and West only have meaning on the SURFACE of something (although that notion confuses some of my colleagues), but what about North and South? I’ve also assumed that North in space was perpendicular to the plane of (orbit of most of the planets in) the solar system, in the general direction of the North Star from here. But that assumption didn’t make sense to my colleague, and we couldn’t find info on it. So I turn to you. Thanks for your help.

    Comment by Jennifer — January 19, 2007 @ 9:33 pm

  6. I can’t wait for his answer.

    Comment by michael — January 19, 2007 @ 9:49 pm

  7. Good luck with that. I mean, what are you going to do instead of waiting, Michael? And now that we’ve (between us) filled up three slots on the “recent comments” board, do you suppose the question will scroll off before he gets back from the “leisure world [t]here in Boulder, enjoying the snow, concerts, fast internet, good friends”? Hey, wait a minute, I thought his good friends were on the East Coast.

    Comment by Jennifer — January 19, 2007 @ 11:14 pm

  8. We may have been a friendly distraction for him while at work, but now that life is all play, he may no longer need us.

    I like your planes of orbit idea, but directions are assigned for points of reference just a objects around us are given arbitrary names. In infinity there are no ups and downs. Hey, that’s like a double’ entendre isn’t it? Or should I be drinking something other than decaf?

    Comment by michael — January 20, 2007 @ 6:56 am

  9. Yes.

    Comment by Jennifer — January 20, 2007 @ 7:12 am

  10. My understanding is that our north/up is defined by the axis of our rotation, a geometry not exactly aligned with the net axis of the orbits of the planets, but both geometries are relevant/perceivable from both from within and without the planet or system.
    That slight misalignment (and, I think, a slight ellipsis to our orbit) gives us our seasonal variation.

    Planet rotational inertia, though, would argue for alignment — I don’t think our axis of rotation could be radial or tangent to our orbit (or if so, it could not vary relative to the plane it established relative to the plane of orbit, so our seasons would vary immensely.

    And all that blah blah aside (which could very well be folderol), I have no idea if/how the sun rotates …

    Comment by adam — January 20, 2007 @ 7:41 am

  11. Spoiler warning — for those who’d prefer to wait for Good Sir Rakk to chime in, do not follow the following link (triple-dubs removed per MT’s predilections):
    enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/sun/rotation.shtml

    Comment by el Kib — January 20, 2007 @ 8:47 am

  12. And then there is this gem full of staggering figures:
    http://mb-soft.com/public/sunrotat.html and this one with a nice movie: windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun/Solar_interior/Sun_layers/differential_rotation.html

    Comment by el Kib — January 20, 2007 @ 8:54 am

  13. Did you notice it shows an “N” on the diagram, but it talks about the perpendicular to the ecliptic? (I knew the sun rotates, so this isn’t a spoiler. I don’t feel my question has been answered.)

    Comment by Jennifer — January 20, 2007 @ 5:15 pm

  14. Adam, I can’t find a video at the ucar.edu site. And I just wanted to say … the slight (2-4%, I forget exactly) ellipsis to our orbit contributes not a whit to our experience of seasons. It’s all in the tilt, which makes the sun angle so very different (maximum of 47 degrees of difference) in the winter than in the summer, substanitally reducing the intensity of light in the winter.

    Comment by Jennifer — January 21, 2007 @ 5:23 pm

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