Strike

On Friday, we walked the dog just ahead of sunset. It had been an overcast day, warm and humid, but not too bad. The clouds didn’t look particularly threatening at that moment, either for rain or wind or a possible thunderstorm.

After we returned, I went out to our deck to enjoy the twilight and to read a book I’d just started, A Need to Testify by Iris Origo (1984), which is composed of biographical sketches of four brave anti-fascists – you’d have to be brave – in Fascist Italy. It seemed like a good thing to read after I’d re-read Homage to Catalonia, which seemed like a good thing to re-read after many years, and after visiting Catalonia.

The deck has a broad view off to the south. As dusk settled in on Friday, I noticed cloud-to-cloud lightning far off to the southwest. Blue and white lighting up the gray clouds. So far away that I heard no thunder, and not close enough for me to head inside. Not yet, anyway. Still, it’s good to take lightning seriously. Drops of rain started to fall, but not many. Enough to splash the book. I parked myself under the house’s awning and kept reading in that dry spot. My glasses, which I’d left on cast-iron table on the deck, started collecting droplets.

For 10 or 15 minutes, it got darker but the rain got no heavier. There wasn’t much wind, if any. I looked up from my book and noticed the lightning to the southwest was now a lot closer. Time to go inside, I thought, and I collected my glasses and my book and pretty soon I’d settled on the couch in the living room to carry on reading. Soon I heard heavy rain but still not much wind, and scattered thunder off in the distance.

The rain grew heavier and the thunder grew louder and then BOOM! That meant close by lightning. Very close. BOOM! BOOM! Somewhere in the neighborhood, I figured. Not unusual at all. Happens a few times a year. The rain continued and I continued reading. Our power was still on and I hadn’t heard anything hit the roof, so I wasn’t worried. Before long, in no more than a half hour, the thunder and rain had slacked off.

Late that evening, when all was quiet outside, Ann let the dog out into the back yard, and then came to me and said, “You should look outside. The table’s knocked over.”

What? Really?

There it was – our cast-iron table, flipped nearly upside down, about eight or nine feet from where it usually is (I measured later) and four feet from the door but not blocking it, with the deck umbrella thrust toward the ground near where we keep our blue recycle bin.

Wind did that? I wondered. What wind? I didn’t hear any wind during the storm. How was it I didn’t hear the table crashing to the other side of the deck?

Considering that it was dark, and still wet on the deck, and the hour was latish – about 11 by this time – I left the task of moving the table back until the morning. Also, I wanted to take a few pictures.deck 7/15/2023

The table is on the right, of course. To the left is a heavy base in which we put the umbrella pole. So the table and umbrella flew in tandem from that point to where they came to rest, leaving the base behind.deck 7/15/2023

If not for the deck umbrella, I think the table would have gone further, and maybe flipped all the way over. In any case, the table, which is cast-iron and weighs maybe 100 pounds, has never been moved by wind from its spot on the deck in the 20 years we’ve lived here, though occasionally the umbrella has been lifted away, and sometimes ahead of wind I move the table to be flush with the house’s wall. I know that the table could fly, of course, in the event of a tornado, say. Or maybe a focused micro-burst? A really focused micro-burst?

I checked for other damage in the area. Luckily, I found none. The deck was OK (though it’s old). The roof looked OK, which was a relief, since it isn’t that old. The back yard fences were still standing, as they have in much worse wind after I re-enforced them this spring. There weren’t even any branches on the ground in either the back or front yards.

How precise was that micro-burst anyway? And could it properly be called a micro-burst? A nano-burst maybe?

For a few minutes, that took me on a digression. I knew that pico-, femto- and atto- are smaller than nano-, in that order getting smaller, so I wondered about the whimsical coinage of pico-burst or femto-burst or atto-burst. How much force would those smaller winds involve? Not much, I imagine. A femto-burst might be what, a fart?

I looked up the metric prefixes and found out that recently – last year – the General Conference on Weights and Measures (Conférence générale des poids et mesures, CGPM), which defines measurement standards internationally, added four more prefixes to the SI.

Two smaller: ronto and quecto, 10 to the minus 27th power and 10 to the minus 30th, respectively. Two larger: ronna and quetta, 10 to the 27th power and 10 to the 30th, respectively.

Just for reference: 10 to the 30th power is

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Just for grins, because who could use a number that large or that small? Scientists and engineers, apparently, which makes me marvel that the frontiers of science and engineering involve measurements of that inconceivable kind.

For comparison: “A convenient unit of length for measuring nuclear sizes is the femtometre (fm), which equals [10 to the -15th power] metre,” Britannica says.

“The diameter of a nucleus depends on the number of particles it contains and ranges from about 4 fm for a light nucleus such as carbon to 15 fm for a heavy nucleus such as lead.”

Back to the Bastille Day incident on my deck. I moved the table and umbrella back to their usual positions on Saturday morning. The table wasn’t scratched or mangled in any way. The canvass umbrella was a little dirty, but undamaged. I could fold and unfold it. (It had been folded during the incident.)

I took a short nap on Saturday afternoon, and when I woke, the first thing I thought was lightning.

There wasn’t the kind of wind needed to hoist the table; or at least, I didn’t hear it, and I probably would have. There was no audio or video running in the living room during the storm. A lightning strike, on the other hand, could move a table. But would it do so without causing other damage? Without burn marks somewhere? Without knocking out the house’s electrical system? There weren’t even any flickers.

Still, the case for lightning was strong. A strike certainly could have the energy to move the table. It would also account for the fact that I didn’t hear the table move. No one in the house did. That measly noise would have been drowned out by the thundering BOOM!

I took a closer look at the umbrella. Fairly faint marks I took for dirt at first didn’t rub off, even with a little water. They were burn marks.deck 7/15/2023 deck 7/15/2023

So lightning had hit the umbrella pole, which is also iron, and blasted the whole setup generally eastward. Parallel to the door, wall and a window. As lightning strikes go, it must have been low powered. Or was it? If you’d asked me before, I’d have thought the umbrella pole wasn’t much of a target, since our much larger honey locus tree lords over the deck and pole. Guess that was a faulty assumption. Or is it? Lightning had never struck the deck in 20 years; or the tree either.

Whatever the imponderables of the strike, we got off easy. No damage, no fire, no electrical disruption.

I’d been sitting at the table maybe 30 minutes before, but I don’t count the strike as a near miss in terms of bodily harm. Three minutes before or 30 seconds before, maybe, but the rain and the exact prospect of lightning had driven me in well before the strike.

The incident will change my behavior on one point, however. That umbrella, which is only up during the warm months, is coming down ahead of thunderstorms, if I can manage it.

Wednesday Winds

Angry clouds passed by this evening. It had rained on and off all day, rain we certainly needed, and early in the evening we got treated to a heavy downpour and the sound of sirens for a few minutes. As for as official warnings, this:

The National Weather Service in Chicago has issued a

* Tornado Warning for…

Northeastern DuPage County in northeastern Illinois…

Northwestern Cook County in northeastern Illinois…

* Until 715 PM CDT.

* At 651 PM CDT, severe thunderstorms capable of producing a tornado

were located along a line extending from Schaumburg to Glendale

Heights, moving east at 30 mph.

And a NWS warning in Spanish buzzed on my phone. By 7:15, the sun was out again, shining on a drenched landscape. We’d gotten a lot of rain, but not a bit of wind. Guess that blew parallel to us.

Then: “The National Weather Service said a tornado touched down near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday following warnings of severe weather for the city. A confirmed tornado was on the ground around 7 p.m., according to the National Weather Service in Chicago,” ABC News reported.

“ ‘This tornado has been touching the ground intermittently so far and is moving east. There are additional circulations along the line south of O’Hare. Seek shelter if in the warned area,’ ” the ABC article said.

“Many tornadoes have struck in the Chicago metropolitan area, and several have hit within the city limits of Chicago, according to the weather service…” ABC concluded (a spot of background or historical context: I know this kind of conclusion well, having written many).

“The deadliest formed in Palos Hills in Cook County on April 21, 1967. The twister traveled 16 miles (26 kilometers) through Oak Lawn and the south side of Chicago, killing 33 people, injuring 500 and causing more than $50 million in damage.”

Another report (NBC News) mentioned a large tornado this evening near Summit, Illinois, which is a lot further away than O’Hare.

So the threat of high winds seems to have passed, at least at my spot on the Earth. But there’s always another day.

A few more thunderstorms are forecast for the near future, but mostly it’s cerulean days ahead.

Or will that be azure days?

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer. Especially Hazy.

Tuesday should have been a fine summer day, but it turned out to be our turn. For Canadian smoke, that is. I had a busy day at the word-processing table and didn’t notice anything besides increasing overcast skies as the day progressed. By late afternoon, I saw how strange the overcast was. Like light fog near the ground, but much thicker fog skyward.

When I went out at about 6 p.m., I thought I smelled a hint of wood smoke, but later, around 8 p.m., I couldn’t smell anything, and Yuriko couldn’t either. Acclimated by that time? Maybe.

From the NWS:

From 11:19 AM (CDT), June 27, until 12:00 AM (CDT), June 29

…AIR QUALITY ALERT IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT CDT WEDNESDAY NIGHT…

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency forecasts Unhealthy (U) for fine particulate matter for the Chicago Metropolitan and Rockford regions on Tuesday June 27th. In addition, the Agency forecasts Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (USG) for fine particulate matter statewide for Wednesday June 28th. Smoke from wildfires in Canada is moving into the region, pushing air quality into the unhealthy or worse categories.

Because of my work, I have unlimited access to three major East Coast newspapers (NYT, WSJ and the Washington Post), so last night I checked them all. You might remember early in June when New York and environs was blanketed with Canadian smoke. That was a BIG NATIONAL STORY! When it happens to Chicago and environs? Of regional interest, way down the page, to go with the heat wave currently gripping Texas.

Today wasn’t as smoky as yesterday, though a light haze lingered. No distinct smell either. Could be that the smoke was worse in the city. Do cities capture smoke, or at least delay its movement more than suburbs? Could be.

It’s been a strange month for weather anyway. Early this month in Los Angeles (more about which later, maybe) instead of balmy summer days, it was in the 60s and misty most of the time. Las Vegas was very warm during the day, but not the blazing heat I expected. Back in northern Illinois, we had a run of about three days cool enough to be April or October in mid-June, and for the entire month, there hasn’t been much rain.

Deck Duty

On a zoom call with a colleague today, I called (in passing) today’s weather here in northern Illinois the Platonic ideal of a spring day. I knew he’d understand the reference, a leftover from a liberal education that occasionally makes its way into movies. I suppose it counts as a kind of exaggeration since, by definition, I think, no actual spring day here on Earth could take the form of a Platonic form, but merely to aspire toward it.

Anyway, it was still warm late in the afternoon when I got the notion to clean my deck. Clear it of such things as broken pottery.

These metal grasshoppers have waited out the winter on an outdoor table. They were gifts, long ago, from Jay and Deb.

A new bird feeder, which I soon filled and hung on a thick tree branch. The brand name: Audubon. In the world of bird equipment, that’s like naming your product after Lincoln.

Our pink flamingo.

It’s cracked up top, so this might be its last summer. For a dollar store purchase, two years might be as long as you can expect.

Thursday Nodules

Did a little shopping at a local grocery store (part of a grocery conglomerate) and saw this display.

The Fourth of July? Really?

The Kingston Trio did a version of “Seasons in the Sun,” in 1964, a song recorded 10 years later to vast popularity by Terry Jacks, one remembered for being as saccharine as a Shirley Temple. One that was on the radio all the time.

The Kingston Trio version has a bitter twist to dilute the sentimentality, which I suspect is closer to the French-language source material. Just another thing I happened across in the YouTube treasure cave.

Not long ago, Yuriko bought an article of clothing at a local store (part of a retail conglomerate), and the clerk forgot to take off the bulky security tag. In trying to avoid a trip back to the store to have it removed, I looked up the matter on YouTube. Musical selections aren’t the only jewels in the cave. Of course, often enough you find cubic zirconia.

One video suggested a technique using two forks that didn’t look remotely easy; another assumed you had a workshop of tools; and a third – my favorite – suggested you simply smash it with a hammer. Never would have thought of that.

Lots of people post images of their meals, usually while there’s still food on the plate. But what about the debris of a good meal? Evidence that you completed the meal, with the hope that you might have enjoyed it.

Chicken bones, in this case. The last leftovers of the Korean chicken we bought about a week ago, and we did enjoy it.

Brand name: bb.q chicken. It is an enormous chain, with more than 3,500 locations in 57 countries. Not quite sure when the northwest suburban outlet we go to opened, but it hasn’t been that long. We drop by once a month or so.

Weed Man

Spring is here, which means lawn care circulars in the suburbs. Paper ads through the U.S. mail that is, which somehow doesn’t seem to be obsolete. Sure, I’ve edged into pre-dotage, but it can’t just be old people who still respond to advertising postcards.

Weed Man (registered trademark) promises weed control (I’d hope so), but also core aeration, lawn fertilization and all manner of other control: crabgrass control, grub control, and mosquito control, and I guess for all the other bugs not covered in those categories, insect control. Also, “landscape bed control,” which I can’t quite visualize.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an ad from Weed Man, or ever heard of it, but I am woefully ignorant of the world of organized lawn care. The card has a professionally produced aspect, so I suspected that it is a large operation. So it is. Franchised.

Weed Man’s web site says (sic): “The first Weed Man turf grass Professional was Desmond Rice, who established his business in 1970 in Mississauga, Ontario. In 1976, he decided to grow the business through franchising. Today, there are more than 300 Weed Man franchises providing Professional horticultural services across Canada, the USA, and in the United Kingdom.”

Ah, Mississauga. Few other places in the world do I have such fond memories of a water treatment plant.

Sad to say, Des Rice, founder of the Weed Man empire, passed from this world of lawns back in 2011.

“He was 100 percent business. Every ounce of energy and every hour he was awake, he was thinking about business and about Weed Man,” his right-hand man Mike Kernaghan told Lawn & Landscape soon after his death.

For $30 + tax, a Weed Man tech will show up to assess my lawn’s potential for de-weedification. Probably they do fine work, but I must pass. They call them weeds. I call it biodiversity.

Still, the name Weed Man is inspired. It could have been the title of cheaply made flick for drive-ins and low-budget movie houses of the Eisenhower era. The name inspired me to go to a random AI generative site and ask the robot brain to paint me a picture.

“Weed Man” seemed a little too slender as a prompt, so I made it, “Weed Man emerging from the forest.”

Not bad. You know, I think I’ve seen him before. Well, Conifer Man anyway.

April Flowers

Temps are expected to dip down to freezing tonight. Bah. But I expect our local April flowers are hardy enough to take it, unlike (say) July flowers that would wilt at a whiff of air below about 50° F.

April flowers at a park not far from where we live.

A lovely scene. Just needed a bit more atmospheric warmth to make an idyllic scene. 

Just carping about the temps, as I do. Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Among the new life of spring, a reminder of mortality.

A plaque I hadn’t noticed before. Because it’s all too new.

This young man, emphasis on young. Enough to set one’s teeth on edge, seeing that one of your children’s generation died so young. RIP, Jake.

Reasons to be Cheerful, Videos 3

Back to posting around March 26. It may not quite be spring, and I don’t mean the equinox, but it is time for spring break, for my nonprofessional writing efforts anyway.

Captured a couple of flags in flight not long ago.

Illinois needs a new flag. Remarkably, it might get one. I didn’t know that until this evening, looking around for alternate designs for the state flag. Of course, with a committee working on the matter, there’s no guarantee of a better flag. Even if the state had a design competition, that might not work out either. Guess we just have to hope for the best, or at least the better.

Bet this rock is in the Suburban Boulder Database, which is maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Or it would be, if I hadn’t made that up. The database, that is, not the USGS, which I assume is real, unless it’s a Deep State trick to persuade us dupes that the Earth is round. Yet who else will give us volcano warnings?

I always take a look at plaque-on-rock memorials when I can. I like the economy of the things. No money, or room, for a bronze or marble statue? No worries, affix a plaque.

That one commemorates the 100th anniversary of the founding of Batavia, Illinois, and was dedicated on September 3, 1933. It mentions the first settler in the area, one Christopher Payne, and lauds him and other early settlers “who here broke the sod that men to come might live.”

Maybe, but Payne and his 19th-century passel of children didn’t stay. They soon moved on to Wisconsin.

Never mind what the poet said, March could well be the cruelest month. So it’s time for cheerful tunes.

A wonderful cover of “Honey Pie” by the newly named The Bygones.

Admiration for one Dutch musician can lead to the discovery of others, such as Candy Dulfer.

And of course, a longstanding reason to be cheerful, “Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3.”

It’s cheerful to recall the first time I remember hearing Ian Dury and the Blockheads — a spring day in Tennessee as I crossed campus. The year, long ago, though at the time it seemed to be the cutting edge of the future. A nearby frat house was broadcasting its musical tastes to all passersby, such as me. The tune: “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.” One of the kinds of things I went to college to experience, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

Beverly Lake ’23

The snow forecast for Friday night didn’t show, though a little rain came the next day. Sunday turned out warmish, around 50 F., and mostly clear.Barrington and Golf roads

We made our way in early afternoon to Beverly Lake, which is on forest preserve land almost as far west in Cook County as you can go.Beverly Lake

The map’s misleading, or at least incomplete. It depicts the 22-acre Beverly Lake, but most of the trails are in open space to the west and northwest. The trails are marked for cross-country skiing, but on Sunday, they were merely soggy in a few places.

“We’ve been here before,” I said. Yuriko didn’t remember, since it was a while ago: a warm day in April 2004, when we got a break from the kids for a few hours. I probably wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t written about it.

The lake.Beverly Lake Beverly Lake Beverly Lake

Trails wide and narrow.Beverly Lake Beverly Lake

We came across a half-dozen volunteers removing invasive species and making a bonfire out of the debris. An older member of the party, maybe the leader, was keen to explain what they were doing. The enemy, he said, is buckthorn. Once he pointed it out, I started seeing it in a lot of places, including along some of the trails.Beverly Lake buckthorn

The buckthorn is the vine-like branches hanging and clinging every which way on the forest trees.

“… buckthorn species were first brought here from Europe as a popular hedging material,” explains the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “They became a nuisance plant, forming dense thickets in forests, yards, parks and roadsides. They crowd out native plants and displace the native shrubs and small trees in the mid-layer of the forest where many species of birds nest.”buckthorn

Even more menacing in black and white, I think.

Former Barrington Banks

It’s an Irish bar now, but it once was the First State Bank of Barrington. Long ago.First State Bank of Barrington building 2022

Spiffy bank building from the pre-FDIC days. I passed by it on my short walk around downtown Barrington. Opened in 1916, closed in 1932, so in the financial world, the bank had a mayfly-brief existence, snuffed out by the Depression. Soon after its banking days were over, a series of popular local restaurants opened in the structure, starting with Last National Bank Tavern, “incorporating the teller cages and vault area into the dining area,” notes an Historic Barrington sign on the building.

Currently it is occupied by McGonigal’s, open only during this century. The mural on the wall – framed by a former window – is signed by one Alex Brubacher.First State Bank building Barrington 2022 mural

Looks like it was painted in anticipation of McGonigal’s, since it features the building; and its place in the neighborhood near a clocktower, commuter rail line and The Catlow, among the many shamrocks; and a date of 2009. According to a sign over the door, the pub opened in 2010, so close enough.

Across the street, another building originally housing a 1910s financial services entity: the First National Bank of Barrington. For those for whom a mere state bank wasn’t good enough. And who knows? Maybe that made the difference, because First National survived the Depression and First State did not.First National Bank of Barrington building 2022

Looks like an upmarket clothier on the first floor these days. First National moved out in 1984. (Odd, if I said “nearly 40 years ago” that somehow sounds longer ago.) It didn’t last much longer as an independent bank; a major regional swallowed it soon after.

Just north of Main St., which puts it in Lake County and not Cook, is a named gazebo.David F. Nelson Community Gazebo

The David F. Nelson Community Gazebo, to be specific, and to gave a name that most passersby probably don’t give a first thought, much less a second. This 2017 article is behind a paywall, but I could read the first paragraph, which tells me that “[Nelson is] known for many years of community volunteerism, as well as serving as the town’s village president.”

Not a bad idea for one’s retirement: become a gazebo