Talking About
Monday and Tuesday. We'll skip yesterday, certainly, ten hours on the road arriving in Oakland at six in the evening, the air hot and humid. A decent drive down Highway 5, but the kind of decent you don't need to repeat. Next time this retiree is driving up the coast and taking three or four days, arranging his stops in photogenic towns on the ocean. If you're driving Highway 5 with your hands clenched on the wheel you're not taking pictures. Oh, and we'll skip Monday too. A three hour drive back to Lake Oswego but with a nice sushi dinner later with my sister, Chris, his wife Susan and their next door neighbor and friend Connie. I had sake starting with their large flask of house hot sake, then an individual serving of Momokawa “g” and Momokawa Silver. I slept like a log.
Wednesday. So, back to the morning café for breakfast after a week's absence; the sleep last night spotty. A thirty minute walk around the neighborhood in the early afternoon, not enough walking during my trip to Seattle, so an ache or two now that I've finished. Need more aches or two's after I've finished.
I mentioned it was overly warm when I returned yesterday in the early evening. They've declared a “spare the air day” today, so I guess it's been like this since I left, the temperatures inland today a hundred and seven. It's similarly warm here on the water, eighty-two at the moment, the humidity a reasonable thirty-five percent. I have the fan blowing over me as I sit here writing rubbish, but understand I'm quite happy to be sitting here with a fan blowing over me writing rubbish. Why else would anyone want to keep a journal?
I told my sister, incorrectly, that Mt. Shasta was essentially snow (glacier) free when I drove past it. The south side of the mountain, anyway. Driving back yesterday I realized the north side of the mountain still had glaciers - you couldn't say it was snow less - but it looked old and tired, snow that had been there for the last five thousand years once covered by younger two thousand year old snow that was now water floating somewhere now in one of our oceans. And, of course, I'm flat wrong in saying it.
Mt. Shasta is evidently the only mountain in the continental United States that is showing growth in its glaciers, all the others are shrinking. Global warming is evidently causing more rain to fall in Northern California and rain at fourteen thousand feet is snow. Ho, ho. The mountain doesn't look all that snowy to my untrained eye in August, all fourteen thousand feet of it, but keep your mouth shut, my man, when you don't know what you're talking about.
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