We woke at 6am to hail. It was hard-hitting, and quite scary. It made our little sound machine’s rain pattern sound quite silly in comparison to nature’s alarm. Alan got up to run to the front room, like a little boy, and look through the windows at the street, which were dusted with whiteness. Pea-sized hail broke the roof of the restaurant below our bedroom window, and we watched with trepidation as a waterfall of gushing water flooded past ruining god-knows-what in their kitchen.
Watching ABC7 this morning, I discovered the Bay Area was dusted in SNOW last night. California. Snow. Yes! A nippy 4% in San Francisco this morning, and all week.
Then, I checked out the weather report, which in this country always makes me laugh, because they use words like ”frigid” and “rainmaker”. One interesting fact is that in the US, they scrunch up their faces when you say “Autumn” like you just said “bottom”, yet the word “Fall” does not appear as a recognised term on www.weather.com.
Now I’m going to do a “did you know?” I just discovered. Did you know that there’s an Absolute Zero? Considered to be the point at which theoretically no molecular activity exists or the temperature at which the volume of a perfect gas vanishes. The value is -273.15° Celsius and -459.67° Fahrenheit. Whew!
So today, I take the time out to be appreciative for the little surprises we wake up to, that turn our day upside-down. Just when we think we have it mapped out, the universe says “No, you don’t!”. I like surprises in a country where money buys everything, and nothing feels out of control. There are days where ozone levels are so measured and controlled, we cannot build fires without checking the daily report on http://www.sparetheair.org. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District can fine people who use fireplaces, wood-burning stoves or pellet stoves when the air quality is in danger of exceeding federal clean air standards. We’ve already had 5 days of bans this winter season. One was Thanksgiving, which was a real downer. But the good news is that significant progress has been made recently in cleaning up outdoor air pollution in the U.S. Between 1970 and 2004, total emissions of the six major air pollutants regulated dropped by 54 percent. This is particularly notable as GDP has increased 187 percent, energy consumption 47 percent, and the population grown by 40 percent during the same time. Globally, its estimated 800,000 people per year die prematurely due to outdoor air pollution, according to a 2005 study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, so I won’t complain. I’ll just put that chimney-sweeper appointment on hold, and snuggle a little closer to my honey, as we bear out the California winter season.
