elainegrey

Anyone know where to get more timely smoke news? Saturday morning, all the Lockheed fire news was reporting on the ash fall in Monterey. But this morning, the Merc shares, "As winds shifted early Saturday, smoke from the fire wafted into the Santa Clara Valley. In the South Bay, measurements of particulate matter edged over the federal standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter in the morning. It diminished later in the day as the smoke drifted north along the Peninsula and up the East Bay corridor."

So it was Lockheed smoke creating the unusually thick haze yesterday.

Morning

It is not early, but my bleary self is still on Pacific time. I don't make tea at home, but Christine fixes my usual breakfast for me. I purchase tea at the airport, sloshing my way to my seat. Middleaged mess, the graduate student next to me finishes reading Fellowship of the Rings and chats up the blonde college student.

Health note: the acute discomfort of the psoriasis in the morning does fade within two hours of waking. Caffine chasing it away?

Takeoff

The plane circled the South Bay, spiraling up in altitude, as I picked out familiar landmarks. And what a landscape! My heart opens to it as I think of each name: the mountain peaks, highways, bays, points, creeks. Most beautiful in the early morning light are the tawny velvet hills east of San Jose. The crazy folds make me think of loose fabric, the loose folds of skin on a hound. Yet there's something taut and toned about those folds, muscular but not hard.

I love living in this landscape.

The Sierra

Lakes - the dammed landscape - are inky bots on the high granite plane. Some snow lingers on eastern faces, gleaming in the dawn, and the eastern slopes are green, not sere, the melt, perhaps, staving off the effects of the dry summer. We must have gone a bit north of Yosimite: I miss seeing Mono lake's strange reflectivity at the base of the steep escarpment.

Now it's basin & range, mysterious arrays of man made fixtures, and human lines intersecting the fractal bifurcations of water sculpted deltas draining to desert from the hills.

Oh. My. God.

The grad student has essentially elicited a therapy level family history from the college student.

I think the crying kid would be easier to block out. This kid clearly needs compassion and help. But, sheesh.

--- A week later ---

Later, when the conversation dwindled half way across the country, i was able to appreciate the new physics grad student's willingness to just listen to this young woman. She clearly did need to talk to a good friend, and it wasn't clear that there was anyone in her life who was reliable and supportive. He also mentioned his wife as wife a good number of times, a useful signal that his interest was simply being sociable.

My "chatting up" was my own sense of the greater gulf in age between me and he than he and her speaking out.

Reading this and thinking about my reflection on Friday, i recognize that i am trying hard to see me as i am, not the me i have in my minds eye. When i was starting high school, i remember that i couldn't wait to be thirty, and time flew -- especially in the catatonia of grad school -- and soon i had overshot the thirty year old mark. I think i still hold myself in mind at thirty. Despite my sense on Friday that i am at ease recognizing the visible signs of being over forty, the edge in my comment about the grad student chatting up the young woman (who was not, as i imagined, a college student from the Bay area returning to the south east) reveals to me that i am not as comfortable as i think i am.

A Friend sent around this analysis of the CA Special Election, which i share with the CA folks: http://www.calchurches.org/IMPACTMay09BallotRecs.pdf

It says "vote no" on all measures, which is my instinct for all budget measures, too, because it seems like the legislature is getting out of doing it's job by passing these decisions on. Where is the measure that the legislators don't get paid unless they produce a budget? The document comes with a social justice point of view, as illustrated here:

We have chosen privilege over justice through minority control of our budget process.

In the early 1980s Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman asked, “Why do the rich need incentives and the poor need desperation?” Nearly 30 years later, California has not answered her question.

and to point to some analysis of process:

The Propositions will solve none of these problems, but they create far, far more difficulties now and down the road.

If we vote NO on these six propositions, and since we have to reopen the budget due to another state revenue shortfall, the Legislature and Governor may be forced to include the $30-plus billion in federal economic stimulus as part of our budget solution. To date, we have no suggestions from either the Legislature or the Governor as to how the federal money will be used, even though that money is directed to assist California to meet its current budget services.