caleb walker

various things

Some interesting (to me) things I've come across lately:

• Slide Rules! I'm old enough to have owned one of these and learned how to use it, but young enough to have never actually been required to use it.
• The Tunguska event was an enormous explosion over Russia in 1908, caused, probably, by a meteoroid. (Where "enormous" equals the largest impact in recent history. (Where "recent history" is undefined.))
• Pocket Eyes is a keychain-sized pair of pince-nez. I think I need a pair. Pince-nez reminds me of a book I read (but whose title I can't remember) where dogs have become sentient and many of them wear pince-nez on their snouts. And it's kind of a cool retro-y word.

There you go.

bridges

It's Rachel Carson's birthday today (via). She wrote Silent Spring, the book that launched the environmental movement. I've never read her, but I often walk across her bridge. 

Downtown Pittsburgh is linked to the North Shore and the South Side by a butt-load of bridges. I work on the northern shore of the Allegheny River, which has three identical bridges over it. The 6th Street Bridge crosses from Downtown to the baseball park so it's called the Roberto Clemente Bridge. The 7th Street Bridge crosses over to the Warhol Museum and is called the Andy Warhol Bridge. And the 9th Street Bridge, the Rachel Carson Bridge, crosses over to... Well, the Alcoa Building, I guess. Or maybe the hobo village under the Parkway underpass.

square

I woke up with the alarm this morning. KR is visiting a friend in Philly this weekend, so I had to get up to do the early dog-walk and open the shop on time (I was nearly late. It took about a half hour to get the frozen car door open and scrape all the ice.). I heard the radio before I woke, and I woke before I opened my eyes. But when they finally came open I was facing the bedroom windows. There are three of them in a row, facing west. They're square with mullions dividing them into nine squares, like a tic-tac-toe grid. Like Hollywood Squares.

Centered in the middle square, Paul Lynde's seat, was the moon. The sun had not risen yet, but it was on its way. The sky was dim and the moon was bright in its square. This is the nearest to the earth the moon will be for, apparently, the next fifteen years. I lay there for about fifteen minutes watching the moon drop into the tree branches.

ice crystal cloud rainbow

The other morning was clear and cool. I walked to the bus stop with my head back, looking at the high, whispy clouds. All the neighbors, I imagine, pressed their faces to their front windows and said to each other, "Look. there's that guy who mumbles to himself as he walks past every morning. What's he doing now?" Maybe they looked up too, searching for something other than clouds and sky.

There's usually something interesting going on in the sky here. At night there's Comet Hughes. And, while it won't be performing in Cirque de Soleil anytime soon, it is interesting to watch from night to night, looking for changes in it at the same time as the world's scientists are. We also have hawks here and once in a while a noisy prop plane passes over. On a more regular basis, though--in the mornings and evenings--there are the crows. KR and I have been watching them commute over our house for as long as we've lived here. Where they come from and where they go to we don't know, but we like watching the traffic overhead. There's even the occasional outburst of road rage, with the combatants doing the usual squawking and pecking at each other mid-flight.

But the other morning there were just whispy clouds up there. But wait. At the end of one finger of cloud was a sort of fingernail of color. An old Tae Kwon Do buddy over on Flickr identified the phenomenon as an "ice crystal cloud rainbow." Ordinary rainbows form opposite to the sun, but this one was near it. It looked like a visible segment of an invisible rainbow that circled the sun.

the fall sky

Comet Holmes is my new favorite night-sky buddy.

I like fall on an aesthetic level, but usually mourn summer's warm nights and evenings on the porch watching the sun go down. My feet go cold sometime in October, not to warm up again until May. I do like the fall night sky, though. Perseus, Taurus, and the Pleiades are up at a reasonable hour, and Orion's not too far behind. And with the cooler temperatures the air's clearer, so everything looks brighter and sharper.

Then there's the whole Comet Holmes thing now. For some reason a tiny comet visible only with a powerful telescope suddenly became a million (yeah, literally) times brighter a couple weeks ago. So bright it can easily be seen with the naked eye. With binoculars it looks like a round fuzzy white ball. Nobody knows what it's going to do now, whether it will get brighter, dissipate, fade out, or stay as it is. I'm watching, though.

note to kr

Hi. I forgot to tell you this morning.

After you went to bed last night I took out the trash then stood in the dark while the dogs puttered around the yard, Abi stomping around in the leaves and Georgia sniffing the air wishing she was off her cable so she could go on a walkabout. It was clear and cool, and the stars were sharp and bright and numerous. So I went inside and got my binoculars.

The Pleiades are up now at a reasonable hour, and are as beautiful as last year. Maybe more. Pegasus was almost overhead so I had to crank my neck all the way back to see the Andromeda galaxy. I could see it without the binoculars as a faint smudge, and quite clearly with them. A meteor flashed by, just below Pegasus. Not a firey one like we saw this summer, but one that looked like a falling star. I pointed the binoculars at the bright stars in Cassiopeia, Perseus, and at a few others. I looked for Draco, which wraps around the Little Dipper in some manner and has an October meteor shower named after it, but couldn't see it.

Anyway, I wished you'd been out there with me.

more progress

Through my office window I can watch scenes of destruction and construction on the site of Carnegie Mellon University's new Gates Center for Computer Science. I've enjoyed watching the giant yellow machines knock down the ugly buildings and rip up the ground and reshape the earth's surface.

I've watched all this through the branches of a delicate birch tree outside my window. There are not many other trees in the immediate area, so the sparrows and cardinals would sit out there and look for their brethren and sing and maybe look for other trees.

This morning when I got to my office the tree was nothing but a pile of brush. They've torn it down.

The official plans call for a little forest of aspens around my corner of the building, but I won't see them until 2009, when the project is supposed to be finished.

booger-freezin' weather

It's cold out.

It's so cold out that there is no moisture in the air, so your skin hurts even indoors where it's relatively warm. It's so cold that your wife declares the dogs will not get walked today. It's so cold that you wear your ridiculous knit hat and your ugly down coat—the one you only wear at night when walking the dogs—instead of your nice wool peacoat. It's so cold that the snow squeaks and the wooden steps crack and groan underfoot. It's so cold that you wear your gloves and put your hands in your pockets.

It's so cold that, when you arrive at the bus stop after a seven minute walk, you find ice in your mustache. Then after ten minutes of standing still at the stop your toes have gone numb. It's so cold that the little draft under the back door of the bus creates a little wind chill effect around your feet. Your little pocket notebook's spine has frozen so the pages don't turn, but pop out instead. And the twisting mechanism in your pocket pen has gone stiff so it doesn't push the ballpoint out.

It's so cold out that, when you get to your office and your hands begin to warm, your fingers swell so you run them under cold water. It's so cold out that the sky is clear (it doesn't get this cold out when it's cloudy) and the sun is painfully bright, though not warming. The shadows are sharp-edged and dark. It's so cold out that the contrast out the window is turned way up. The world is blacks and whites.

fox sparrow

Our bird feeders are empty, but all day a fox sparrow has been sitting in the pile of thistle seed in the snow below. He sits there all alone, sometimes picking at the seeds and sometimes just looking at us in the window. He's big for a sparrow, and mottled with dark red and gray. According to my bird book he lives way up in northern Canada in the summer and in the southern US in the winter, so I guess he's just passing through. (Here is more info, and some photos.)

weekend in erie pa

KR and I were in Erie this weekend for my youngest sister's wedding. It was held at a hotel near Presque Isle (what the locals call "the peninsula"). On Friday we had the rehearsal outside in the hotel's courtyard, but we woke up on Saturday to steady rain. The ceremony was moved indoors. Whad'ya gonna do?

(On Friday we went to the peninsula to see the sunset It was a bacteria day, so nobody was allowed in the water, but it was the smell that made KR stop short of stepping in. Then, on Saturday morning, KR and I took a drive around the peninsula in the rain. It's a unique ecosystem, with sand, grasses, aspen trees (or are they cottonwoods?), and grapevines threatening to cover everything. The peninsula is full of holes [pdf map], with marinas and wildlife in its little coves and bays. We even found a small bay jammed full of houseboats. Houserafts, I suppose we should call them since they didn't seem to be very mobile. I think they were hunting cabins for fishing.)

A string quintet provided the music for the wedding and my other sister sang. Most of us in the family think she needs to get herself a professional gig, she's that good. Everything my mother and sister are involved with has great music. And I'm pretty snobby about music, especially in church.

Now, I love giving my siblings advice, but I'm not sure what I can offer to a couple who have been together for twelve or fifteen years already. I assume that marriage changes things in a mature relationship just like it does in a young one. But how? Are there changes in expectations once the relationship is legal and binding? Any insights from the readership?