Spine and Open

Tomorrow is a great sports day.  For one, it is the opening game for the Sounders FC.  Seattle now has a real futbol team. The other great reason is that it the start of the NCAA tournament.  Now March Madness has been going on for all March, but the real fever starts tomorrow.  C-monster sent this great video of the President filling out his bracket.  The President and I do agree on a few things, but we’ll see who has more upsets.  Here is my bracket:

I just got back from 4 days of skiing at glorious Mt. Bachelor.  I had never skied more than 2 days in a row, I was skeptical about my ability to do 3 in a row, much less4.  We got there on Friday.  There were no clouds, you could see for miles, it was really warm, pretty much a day you only get blessed with once in a while.  That day the Summit chair was open, which takes you almost all the way up Bachelor’s 9,065 feet.  We pretty much rode this chair all day.  The fact that I hadn’t skied since January 2nd, combined with the fact that I am not at all used to being at 9,000 feet made me pretty loopy.  I had to lay down in the snow for a while.

Here’s a pic from Jen, of the bowl at the top of the mountain;

I skied in there!

I didn’t ski from the top, since I’m not a double diamond type of skier, but I skied from the middle and it was fun!  A really bizarre feeling with no trees around and just gliding through the remnants of a once super violent place. 

The next couple days the weather got worse (or better if you like the pow pow), which did mean some fresh snow on sunday and monday.  Sunday was the first time I attempted skiing 3 days in a row.  There had been some fresh snow, and towards the base (6,000 feet) it was really wet and hard to move through.  My first run is when I encountered this wet snow.  Of course I was kinda sore from beating my muscles for 2 days, I hadn’t even seen a green run.  Once deep in the wet snow, and just trying to get through it, I felt pain like I had never felt in my life.  I’ve played 6 lacrosse games in one day, I’ve ran in ridiculous relay races, surfed, done all kinds of activities that cause pain, but nothing like this.  It was as if all of the muscles in my legs and back cramped at once, and were just screaming.  I felt like I could hear them screaming.  I finally got to the end of the run, and explained to my ski buddies that I had never felt anything like that before.  We decided to hit some higher elevations to get away from the wet snow.  It worked.  I skied a ton that day.  The weird thing is that on monday, I felt pretty good, not great but pretty good - that was my fourth day of skiing in a row. 

We got back home at about 10 PM on monday night.  I woke up tuesday morning and rode my bike to work - not really sore at all.  How is that possible?  I think that run where I felt the screaming was like breaking some kind of deal with my body; it was asking If I really wanted to.  I think the deal is that my body has agreed to give me more strength as long as I take advantage.  So I’m moving forward with getting in shape for the ski to sea and for the northwest passage relay.  Thanks body and thanks Mt. bachelor for being so great.  Speaking of how great Bachelor is, they had these electronic ticket passes that track your runs, you can check in online, here are my final stats:

that's a lot of vertical!

Head over to space weather to get all the details of the satellite collision that ocurred 800 KM over Siberia.  There is a lot of room in space, you’d think something like this would not happen, but it did.

Some of the info from Space Weather’s sight:

The US Air Force Space Surveillance Radar in Texas reportedly detected echoes from the debris cloud when it passed over the facility on Feb. 11th. Spaceweather.com is streaming live audio from the radar, and it might be possible to hear echoes the next time debris passes overhead. Try listening on Thursday, Feb. 12th, between 4:14 pm and 4:24 pm CST (2214 - 2224 UT). That’s when Kosmos 2251 would have passed over the radar intact had the satellite not been shattered.

Yes that’s right 3:14 to 3:24 (Cascadia time) you could hear space debris on the space radio.  AWESOME!

Here’s what a pentagon official had to say,  “It’s an unfortunate incident that highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in space.”  Yeah, the pentagon wasn’t aware of the impending collision.

Thanks to space weather’s simple satellite tracker, I have been informed that we should be able to see the International Space Station tonite in Seattle - if the clouds hold off of course.

space sightings tonite

You can see that the transit time for the space station is only 3 minutes, so you can’t really mess up with your timing.  I’ve seen the fly by once and it was super cool.  For those of you directionally challenged, here in Seattle look roughly towards the Olympic mountains and in the general direction of Canada.  You should see a bright, small, fast moving light head across the sky over towards the eastside.  This time the ISS will be at a pretty high elevation too, almost straight above (instead of close to the horizon).  I think I will time my bike commute so that I’ll be hitting the ballard bridge at 5:27, it is pretty open there so I should get a great look.    Anyone else?  Bridge party?

Just south of the south end of the Ballard Bridge is a good-sized, mature clump of witch hazels.  Yesterday, I noticed that their other-worldly and carnival inspired flowers had all opened en masse.  Witch hazel is actaully fairly new to me; they are much more common back east, but out west they are a little rare.  And most of the year they look like a small alder or some other decidous shrub.  I remember the first time I saw one, it was winter, most of the plant life were still in their slumber, except a few bulbs that were starting to send up their promising shoots.  There was this large shrub with no leaves and an enormous amount of small, yellow, octopus-like flowers, emitting this simple, complex aroma.  How can I say simple complex aroma?  The aroma of witch hazel is very pure, it doesn’t really change over time or distance, that is why I would call it simple.  The reason I call it complex is becaue it is a hard to describe scent.  Many folks know it from their grandmother’s medicine cabinet, as “Hammamelis water.”  I was unable to smell this clump of witch hazel’s becuase of the prevailing winds, and I think the shear cold of the morning had numbed my face completely.  Even though I could not capture the fragrance, I felt a surge of joy.  The appearance of the flowers means that spring is comming.  Thank you Witch Hazels!

A friend of mine is being seriously beaten down by the Man right now.  At this point in our career paths most of us have gotten used to the tyranny of the Man.  

There are  some ways to subdue the pressure the Man can exert on any one human.  While I enjoy this topic, I have yet another question.  Do most of us really want to break free of the Man?  The (majority of the) collective actions of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, (I will further demarcate another subspecies) western world, point to the fact that we now base our evolutionary fitness on our ability to please the Man. 

If you moved to your own 5 acres and became self-sufficient, there would be no one to blame for your misery, wasting away, addiction to reality TV or other drugs.  There would be much less of a sense of order.  In essence, you would have to be the Man to yourself.  I’m just about ready to give it a try, but it would certainly not be for everyone.  I think having someone else to pin alot of one’s personal, and the world’s problems on, is much easier than taking the reins onesself. 

Or is it that we get stuck in a tunnel and we don’t know exactly how we got in there, or exactly when the walls started shrinking in, but we certianly are not able to see the light; and there is no way to go back, so we just plow forward like everyone else?

I’ve seen it in people (and I am certain that I am a culprit) that we really do fear change and the unknown.  We are afraid to go against the grain of our peers.  Being a radical is scary - even if that means you are a vegan bike-commuter with a salaried respectable job and a mortgage.   The United States is not set-up to deal with vegan bike commuters.  Most people chose not to change one simple thing about their life - like how they get to work - because it is supposedly hard, and it is scary and it might not work.  And who convinced the masses of that?  We are just happy to let the Man work behind the scenes on so many facets of our life, that when we look at something in the forefront - like quitting our day job - we only see reasons that it wouldn’t be possible.  And so the Man continues to own us.

humanity

The week of Thanksgiving to the day after MLK day marks the period of time that I do not bike commute home from work.  This is because it is very dark out.  The darkness itself is not so bad, I have 3 lights on front and 3 on the back and a reflective vest, and an obnoxious yellow coat.  I’m pretty sure that people can see me.  The thing is, people tend to chose not to see during this time.  Drivers are very absent minded during the holidays and the recovery time (Jan. 2 to the day after MLK).  Now that day lengths are getting longer, I can make it home just in time. This makes me really happy, because riding the bus takes a while, and I’d rather be riding in the rain than standing out in it.  As a bonus I will now earn an extra $1.75 per day too.

Thank you increased day length!

I still have and enjoy looking at my drawings of mushroom spores.  They are very beautiful.  The shapes are amazing.  Here’s some pics (stolen from mushroomexpert.com):

I just read this article about how the shapes of mushroom spores aid their trajectory.  It is a very cool and short summary of the published article.

I went to a show on Thursday night and Levi Fuller opened the night.  He plays accoustic guitar through an amp and has a drummer.  The tunes were engaging.  Before one of them he said, “Everyone has a song about Cephalopods these days” and he went into his tune about Colossal Squid.  Octopus is one of my favorite animals.  I have spent hours trouncing around in Puget Sound low tides looking for them.  I did get to see one in Maui while snorkeling and it is one fo the great moments of my life.  Octopus are intelligent, mischevious, and they show their emotions by changing color.  Anyway,I got to thinking how many songs about Cephalopods are really out there?  Not too many, but I did come across the Cephalopod Appreciation Society, which has a link to Levi’s tune.  There is even an online Octopus magazine.