Left hanging dry

 

A map of today's jet stream

Since mid-September, I have been rather unsettled by the quality of the daylight, particularly at dawn and dusk. 

It took me some time to figure how what the problem was.  Slowly, I realized that the light really isn't odd for the time of year.  The temperature has been.

The heat hasn't been oppressive in Victoria, but it's been warm, like a temperate summer day.  

Summer.  Not autumn.

It's been warm enough that local berries have been available for more than two months later than we would normally have them.  They were late, of course.  My journals are full of comments about how cold it was in May and June.

When I walk out in the evenings, I'm startled by how soon the sun sets.  It's setting at the normal time for just past the equinox, but my skin expects the light to linger into mid-evening.  The quality of the light seems unfamiliar, because it's not accompanied by rain.  Just as I couldn't put my fleece tops away in June, I cannot yet part with my summer cottons and linens.

I gather the problem is the jet stream.  For weeks and weeks, it has been hanging in a high loop at the top of the province of British Columbia.  When we're south of the jet stream, things get warm.

Now, according to the map, which I found at netweather.tv - it's pretty nifty; it's interactive - the dangling loop of jet stream will drop below us in about ten days, at which point, things will get recognizably autumnal.  

It may be too late for the salmon, though.

Evening, and I look to the south, as I walk our neighbourhood.  The sky is a light yellow colour above the purple peaks of the Olympic Mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  It's a colour I associate with winter, but without the damp and cold.  I shiver, anyway.

Snow glob

It's the shortest day of this benighted year.

There's a Great Conjunction tonight, not seen since the 13th century (the one in the 17th century was apparently not visible at night), so, of course, we've been socked in by a relentless grey sky pelting us with heavy rain and fat mashed-potato gobbets of snow.  

The ground was already saturated when the snow plummeted, and so the white stuff is not getting much of a purchase on the soggy ground.  It has managed to accumulate not far north of us; the buses in and out of the Saanich Peninsula have been cancelled, as have several sailings of the ferries.  

A friend of Double Leo Sister, whose only crime was venturing from Parksville for a medical appointment, and dropping off Demeter's gift, has spent the better part of the day trapped on the Malahat Highway, a road that follows the south-east coast of Vancouver Island through the Cowichan Valley, and by some heart-stopping chasms, and. if blocked by snow or the resulting accidents, is practically inescapable.

I limited my forays to miserable short slogs, and spent the morning taking advantage of the Resident Fan Boy's ill-advised trip to a shopping mall.  I slipped my treasure trove of presents into bags, and emptied the contents of the "rehearsed" Christmas stockings into old purses, suitable for hiding until Christmas Eve.  

Last week, I made a careful inventory of the RFB's collection of Doctor Who novels, and slipped into Russell's Books for four more to fill out his stocking.  I discovered a few days later, that the RFB, having run out of space in his designated and sacred Doctor Who bookshelf, has been adding his novels to a lower shelf in the dining room.  I checked today to see which books I'd duplicated.  All four, dammit.  Now I've got to sneak into Russell's with only three shopping days left - something I'd hoped to avoid.  (I'll stick the four duplicates into one of the many "little libraries" in my neighbourhood -- perhaps the one on my old street.)

On a brighter note, yesterday, I prepared the Christmas tourtière for freezing, so I rewarded myself this morning with an account at the Globe Theatre, in order to live-stream (Snow) Globe, this year's version of the annual Christmas play for children at the famous venue for Shakespeare's plays -- closed for business, along with all of London's theatres, by this new plague.

It's snippets of Shakespeare, snatches of modern Christmas songs, and written and performed by Sandi Toksvig, and contains wry wit, in-jokes, and much of the longing for contact that has beset rather more of us than usual this year.  I enjoyed it very much.

I'll go to the roof tonight.  The forecast is for clearing skies.

Magic mushroom

In Victoria, weather forecasts are a wee bit less useful than in Hades, due to what I call "mushroom-cap clouds".

Not mushroom clouds. Now, that would be a real problem.

Yesterday, for example, I had walked into Cook Street Village to retrieve a parcel from the Post Office on a fresh and sunny morning. Having done so, I was standing on the sidewalk, juggling my parcel and bag, when I realized my phone was ringing. (One of my great Christmas blessings is a new FitBit which, because it's linked to my phone, vibrates when calls and texts come in. This is a great boon, because my winter coat is an effective phone muffler.)

Elder daughter was calling from Hades, having been blindsided by a work-related lapse in diplomacy on the part of her boss. I put my burdens on a bus stop bench, and when I realized she needed a lengthier vent, started trudging toward the coffee shop, only half-aware of how dark the skies had suddenly become.

It was one of those mushroom-cap clouds: broad, vaguely circular, brownish-grey. The rain drove me quickly into the patio of the Moka House - where a tall, elderly gentlemen, in his cohorts' uniform of leather jacket and jeans, dropped the door in my face.

With a bit of further juggling, I managed to re-open the door, held it open so two further men of a similar vintage could exit, then watched as oblivious elderly gentleman (perhaps "gentleman" is a misnomer) took one of the two remaining tables. I grabbed the other one, and sat to hear elder daughter out, discussing strategems and chatting about the impossibly girly baby shower she was to attend that afternoon.

Feelings soothed, I got my coffee and set out my work. Two tables away, two fellows sat down, got out their guitars and started playing. It was rather like a conversation between their instruments while the rest of us listened in. They leaned toward each other intently, improvising. I thought of Stéphane Grapelli, then stopped myself. No, he played violin.

Got out my phone, that amazing pocket-computer, and found Django Reinhardt.


Eventually, the staff got the hint and turned off the piped-in rock music. Outside, the sun shone once again on the shiny street.

A tall bassist arrived, unwrapping his instrument, which matched him in height, but it was time for me to go. I stopped by their table, and told them how much I enjoyed their music. One of the guitarists, his face suddenly youthful when not concentrating, grinned up at me: "Right on!"

I don't think I've heard "Right on!" in some time. Ah, Victoria....

The oncoming storm

I locked the door late that sunny afternoon, and as younger daughter and I headed out into the street, noticed for the first time that there was a wall of dark grey closing off the eastern horizon.

That's all right, I told myself. I felt the breeze on my cheeks as we turned west. That meant the storm was blowing east, surely.

As we approached the Dairy Queen, a twenty-minute down-hill trot, I noticed that the clouds appeared to be keeping pace with us, rumbling all the while. Still, the sun shone brightly, so brightly that younger daughter and I took seats well inside the restaurant.

By the time we finished our meals and got up to order our ice creams, we noticed that it was raining outside. I had not brought umbrellas. We decided to eat our desserts inside, in hopes the rain would subside.

It did, after a fashion, and a bus came immediately. At our home stop, the rain-drops were still almost dodge-able. We hurried the final few blocks. Younger daughter was the first to spot the lightening forks. I counted off after the flashes -- just a few seconds. Too close. As we got in the door, it got very dark, I hurried to the other side of the house and could see the storm sweeping in a diagonal line across Oak Bay towards us.
Gee, we're high up, I thought, noting the reason that I had such a great view was because I could see over the tree-tops below the house.

Four hours later, as the storm continued rumbling overhead, another thought occurred to me, and I started the search for candles in this house-sit. I placed them, with matches, at the end of the dining room table where I could feel for them if necessary.

It wasn't, but the flashes continued into the early hours of the morning.

(This happened last Friday, but it was only today that I found a coffee shop with strong enough WiFi to upload the pictures from my laptop online.)

Tornado watch

I always know we're in trouble when the clouds have a greenish tinge to them. This morning, Environment Canada mentioned in passing that a tornado was possible in "Eastern Ontario, near the Québec border". Uh... That's us....

The Resident Fan Boy has vivid memories of a summer a few years ago when he was alone in the house while I house-sat in Victoria with our daughters.  The guy on the Weather Network was practically gleeful in his excitement:  "A tornado is going to hit Ottawa!!!"  The RFB and our next-door neighbour were not quite as thrilled.  They stood on our shared porch watching slack-jawed as the khaki-coloured clouds billowed, before it occurred to them that they really should be sheltering in their respective basements.  The tornado touched down some kilometres to the south-east, and did some damage there.

This morning, I quickly tapped out warning messages to the RFB, elder daughter at work in Nepean, and younger daughter's head teacher.  Our server dropped our internet connection shortly afterwards, a common occurrence when the barometer plunges.  I set off into the hot, humid, and seemingly relentlessly sunny afternoon to retrieve younger daughter.  As I walked up to the school, I could see the greenish tinge and odd clumpy shapes of thunderheads.  By the time we left for the bus stop twenty minutes later, the sky had darkened and as I heard the first rumbles, it occurred to me that younger daughter and I were running across a field....

The fat, well-spaced raindrops were hitting the pavement as we made it to the shelter, and as I gazed out anxiously for our bus, I saw a ghostly green swirl above the open field across the street.  I blinked disbelievingly and our bus appeared.

By the time we were looping up Baseline toward Maitland, the windscreen on the bus was splattered with rain, and I noticed a bus going in the other direction bearing an ad for the upcoming Ottawa Jazz Festival:  "Be prepared to be blown away."  Oh dear.  A stage actually got blown down at Blues Fest last summer.  You'd think they'd choose their slogans more carefully.

For the record, we did get home safely, but our bus got blasted with fire-hose-force rain and hail which poured through the roof vent that someone had opened, in spite of the air-conditioning.  I hope we don't get blown away before I escape to Demeter for the summer...

Wanna make thumbthing of it?

Oh, but I'm damp and crabby. In the true and vicious tradition of April in Hades, we were forced to walk to the bus stop this morning through a precipitation which Environment Canada describes as "wet snow" but that is actually thick white missiles that go plop-plop-plop like a blizzard of bird-droppings. By the afternoon, I was forced to go out again in what was now cold, pelting rain.

I hadn't had enough sleep because I stayed up to watch The Killing and The Borgias. The former is an American retelling of a Danish murder-mystery series filmed in Vancouver. I recognise next to no one in the cast, but so far, it's compelling. The latter is clearly a very expensive production, features three fabulous actors: Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, and Colm Feore, and each shot looks like a High Renaissance painting. Then they lost me. In a beautifully photographed, sumptuous recreation of Rodrigo Borgia's procession on his way to being crowned Pope, I listened in disbelief to the background music which was Zadok the Priest. You know, that coronation anthem that George Frederick Handel composed in 1727? They even played it kind of softly, as if hoping no one would notice. Well, they didn't sneak it past me, and then they killed off Derek Jacobi's character, so to heck with them and their bleedin' anachronisms.

Boy, I'm cranky. So I'm putting myself to bed early tonight and leaving you with this gem which is undoubtedly long past its expiry date in Britain:I like this so much, I've friended Bertram Thumb-cat on Facebook. So there.

Green scream

Spring is a fleeting thing in Hades. Generally, it has flown by the Victoria Day weekend (which was last weekend), if anyone has actually noticed that it was here in the first place. Garden centres in The Nation's Capital have been known to openly admonish eager and deluded gardeners who attempt to plant their annuals before May 24th.

This year was an excellent illustration of the folly in not waiting; we've been on a roller-coaster of wildly fluctuating temperatures since March, veering from summer-like heat to a sudden killing frost overnight, then back again. What has been truly weird about the season is that I cannot remember, during my last nine springs here, a time when daffodils, tulips, and lilacs have been blooming at the same time. Generally, the daffs show up in late April/early May, give way to the tulips which are gone by the time the lilacs burst forth with heady fragance in late May to early June. It's late May. The lilacs are nearly gone, having climaxed with the last of the tulips two weeks ago.

Even a "normal" Hades spring reminds me of the Sunbane from the relentlessly bleak trilogy of trilogies written by Stephan R. Donaldson. I vaguely remember making it about halfway through the second trilogy, but there's only so much leprosy, blood-letting and self-loathing one can stomach and I'm really not that much of a fantasy fiction fan. However, the passages describing the unnatural Sunbane spring, with trees being forced into leaf in paroxysms of green agony, stayed with me. I'm reminded of them each time spring comes to Ottawa, and the buds suddenly erupt from the long-barren branches, then hemorrhage into full leaf, usually within the space of a few days. Listen...are the maples screaming?