Snow.
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Bunch of wind and rain lately? It's the coast. It's winter. Makes sense. Two atmospheric rivers in as many weeks? That's a tad abnormal. Lots of flooding. A couple roads either had landslides fall across the top of them or flowing water undercut the ground beneath them. Either way you get a road that's not usable for a while.
Also, I'm not quite sure why the Oregon Department of Transportation has a Flickr page, but it's kinda nifty they do. It also kinda feels old school, like they might still have an AOL email address. I picture them sitting in their chairs, faces illuminated by the glow of the computer screen, rubbing their hands together while whispering, "Someday. Someday. Someday." over and over again.
Eternal optimists, are ODOT employees.
The storms did a little damage to our yard, as you can see below. Our property backs up to a forest - actually the final thirty feet or so of our yard is the forest - and one of the trees gave up the ghost during the first windstorm.
Eventually we'll get some one to chop it up a bit and we'll just let it lie, it's a PNW forest on the coast, there's already a bunch of trees down.
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Christmas Eve is my favorite day of the Christmas season. It's dark and cozy. Magic, but not a magician's magic, not an abracadabra kind of magic, no sleight of hand here, it's a deep, elemental, intrinsic magic. It's nighttime with snow on the ground and crisp, chilly air, air that turns your breath to fog and when watch the fog float away you notice the cold, white pinpricks of stars winking in the darkness. Christmas day is nice, it's all light and glowing and love and presents and a grand meal, but give me that dark, cold, magical solitude of the night before, please.
Happy Christmas Eve.
I've been enjoying the Dungeons & Dragons podcast from the groovy folk over at Nuzzle House. Love it. They're having a good time, and it's neat to get to listen to them have it. I tried playing D&D once. I must have been around 10? 11? I had a friend who was really into it and he always tried to get me to play with him. I finally tried it and was just bored to tears. To be fair, it was just him being the Dungeon Master and me playing solo. Dullsville. When my mom asked how it went I told her it gave me nightmares (it didn't) and she immediately forbade me from playing it again (I knew she would, satanic panic was in full effect). Every time my friend asked me to play after that I got to tell them my mom wouldn't let me. Never played again.
I would feel guilty about it except my friend also had a laser tag set and he never let me play it with him. Not once. Jerk!
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Highlights From NASA'S Solar Dynamics Observatory - 10 Years of Solar Observation
Since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO has collected millions of scientific images of our nearest star, giving scientists new insights into its workings. SDO’s measurements of the Sun — from the interior to the atmosphere, magnetic field, and energy output — have greatly contributed to our understanding of our closest star. SDO’s images have also become iconic — if you’ve ever seen a close-up of activity on the Sun, it was likely from an SDO image.
Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).
That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home galaxy at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation.
caveat lector