South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates

Sunny and nearly warm on Saturday, at least for a few hours. Time for a stroll around South Ridge Park in Hoffman Estates.South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates

Perhaps a mile all the way around the pond. Not crowed on the path at all.South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates

South Ridge is one of a small string of parks in that part of the village connected by walking paths, all located away from main streets. The better to be enjoyed mostly by locals, no doubt.South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates South Ridge Park, Hoffman Estates

Skipped the playground, which includes (not pictured) an obstacle course for small fry. These days, our small fry are large fry. But there were a number of families around, enjoying the playground equipment on a Saturday afternoon in the park.

Thursday Rolls Around Again

Lilly’s been in town for a few days. We’re glad to see her, as always. We’re glad to eat sushi with her, as always.

Another big thing this week is that I got a new phone. Today. With a new carrier. Apparently my old phone was old indeed, since I bought it so I could take it to Mexico City. Soon after that, I discovered the highest and best use for a mobile phone: pulling up Google Maps.

Lately the old phone had been showing its mechanical senility by disconnecting at inconvenient times. This happened more and more often, until it was completely unreliable. One of the last messages that got through, yesterday, was the modern version of the Emergency Broadcast System: The National Wireless Emergency Alert System.

Or Sistema Nacional de Altera Inalambrica de Emergencia.

The sound was jarring, as I expect it’s supposed to be. I wonder how cacophonous a big room full of phones was — say a classroom that doesn’t make its students turn off their devices.

A presidential alert, no less. I like to think that FEMA technicians brought a suitcase to the Oval Office, opened it up, and President Biden pushed a button inside to set off the alert. Maybe a blue button, since a red button might be on the nuclear football, and set off something else all together.

Temps cooled down today after overnight rain. No freezes yet, so we still have flowers in the back yard.back yard flowers back yard flowers back yard flowers

The Flowers of October. That has to be the title of something.

Fort Sheridan Water Tower

Where are those copy editors, anyway? A Washington Post correction from today.

Much of the former Fort Sheridan in Lake County, Illinois, is now a residential neighborhood, which is only reasonable. Even when it was an Army base, it was mostly residential. The officers’ houses are now refurbished single-family houses and the enlisted men’s quarters are now refurbished multifamily.

Time was short on Saturday, so I didn’t have all the time I wanted to look around the post-military neighborhood, but we did take a stroll on the former parade ground, which is now green space looped by Leonard Wood Ave.Fort Sheridan 2023 Fort Sheridan 2023
Leonard Wood. Ask people driving on Leonard Wood who that might have been and his obscurity would assert itself in the form of blank stares and wild guesses.

I don’t know the details of all of his lengthy military career, but I do know that TR theoretically reported to him in Cuba in ’98 and that, in some alternate reality, Wood captured the Republican nomination for president in 1920 and went on to be 29th President of the United States, rather than the office going to a newspaper publisher from Ohio.

In that case, Wood would surely be remembered. Maybe about as much as Harding. Which might not be that much.

We spotted the fort’s former water tower on the other side of the grounds.Fort Sheridan Water Tower 2023

I had to see that up close, so we stopped by before we headed south for our lunch appointment.Fort Sheridan Water Tower 2023 Fort Sheridan Water Tower 2023

Impressive. A design by noted Chicago architectural firm Holabird and Roche, who did many of the fort’s buildings.Fort Sheridan 2023 Fort Sheridan Water Tower 2023 Fort Sheridan Water Tower 2023
Per Wiki: “Built from 1889 to 1891, the tower was among the first structures completed in the fort. It was built with bricks made from Lake Bluff clay and designed to resemble St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice.”

Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve

On Saturday, we made our way to the edge of Lake Michigan.Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve

We’d come on the sunny last day of September to Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve, a unit of the Lake County Forest Preserve District. For a little more than a century, the U.S. Army maintained a presence at Fort Sheridan and in surrounding acreage for a shifting variety of uses, until base closure turned the site mostly over the private development, with a relatively small slice added to the forest preserve system.

The decommissioning was in the 1990s. I remember writing about the redevelopment, but after I quit much local reporting about the Chicago area ca. 2005, I tucked whatever I knew about Fort Sheridan in a remote filing cabinet in my memory. That is, I forgot it until not long ago, when I noticed the forest preserve on a map – a paper map – and determined to go, since we were due for lunch with Wendy and Ted later in the day in Evanston anyway.

This forest preserve is only partly forest. We took short trails through prairie. Much is prairie. Much is prairie. Much is prairie. Much is prairie.

A ravine runs through it.Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve

Coloration has started. Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve

Barely but vividly.

Pyro-Monday

One of the benefits of the soaking rain over the weekend is that I felt I could grill this evening without much risk of an embarrassing and possibly dangerous grass fire. Brats were duly cooked for dinner about an hour ahead of sunset, which we consumed on the deck along with salad and for dessert some cannoli I bought on Sunday at a Polish grocery store, which were very close to being as good the best in my experience, those I found years ago not in Italy but in Little Italy in NYC.

There will be fewer such grilling opportunities as the movement of the Earth drags us in the Northern Hemisphere toward shorter days.

At dusk, I decided to burn some of the excess sticks always present in the back yard. The wood was a little damp still, but hot charcoal dries it out, and then ignites it.

There wasn’t much wind – another reason to grill – but enough movement give the fire occasional dramatic arcs.

The peculiarities of digital photography added to the seeming movement of that shot, I think. Soon the fire reached full blaze, best shown by zooming in a bit.

The declining phase.

Staring into a fire you’ve made is surely a pleasure we share with how many generations before us? Many.

“Clear evidence of habitual use of fire, though, comes from caves in Israel dating back between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, and include the repeated use of a single hearth in Qesem Cave, and indications of roasting meat,” notes Time.

Mid-September Sights

Chilly nights, warm days. Such are conditions here in Illinois not long before the fall equinox. The trees are still holding on to their leaves, including our quaking aspen.

Goldenrod, seen here in the back 40 of my yard – that is, the back 40 square feet or so, and how is it farmers had back 40s? Something to do with a quarter of a quarter section, which would be 40 acres, though I expect the metaphorical sense long ago superseded the literal one.

Out on a northwest suburban street.

It isn’t until Saturday, but some local motorists have been ready for Mexican Independence Day since last weekend.

Late Summer Tomatoes

Heard the rumble of thunder at some distance during the wee hours this morning, but upon looking outside after dawn, no rain came of it, at least here. We’ve had a few dry weeks now, with the local grass retreating to its brown state till water comes again.

From our back yard. We’ve been watering our small tomato crop through the dry days.

The quarter came from the Royal Canadian Mint facility in Winnipeg, and I picked it up somewhere near Lake Superior last month, and exported it to the United States.

There were more tomatoes in the dish until recently, today in fact, smaller in diameter than the quarter, but we ate those. Man, garden tomatoes are good. I’m hardly the first person to notice that, but it’s worth repeating.

Did some reading about the late singer and businessman Jimmy Buffet today. This paragraph made me smile.

“Mr. Buffett’s original idea for Margaritaville was ‘to expand the opportunity for as many people to experience the lifestyle immortalized in his iconic song as possible,’ according to the statement on the company’s website,” the New York Times reported. “The company had $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year.”

The lifestyle immortalized in his iconic song? That of a drunken layabout? You don’t need to visit a resort to do that.

Gary Wright also died recently. That makes two popular musicians who first had hits in the 1970s. You know what that means, according to unfalsifiable popular notions. Number three dead ahead, and I do mean dead.

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?