Hello From the Hurricane!

Our Hold on The Planet

A little Robert Frost for Evan's Birthday

We asked for rain. It didn't flash and roar.

It didn't lose its temper at our demand

And blow a gale. It didn't misunderstand 

And give us more than our spokesman bargained for;

And just because we owned to a wish for rain,

Send us a flood and bid us be damned and drown.

It gently threw us a glittering shower down.

And when we had taken that into the roots of grain,

It threw us another and then another still

Till the spongy soil again was natal wet.

We may doubt the just proportion of good to ill.
There is much in nature against us. But we forget:

Take nature altogether since time began,

Including human nature, in peace and war,

And it must be a little more in favor of man,

Say a fraction of one per cent at the very least,

Or our number living wouldn't be steadily more,

Our hold on the planet wouldn't have so increased.

Call Me When I Can Hang My Laundry By The Giant Space Ocean

I love New England. These are my reasons:

Reason #1: There is always weather. Always. Rain, fog, sleet, snow, hail, sunshine, wind, weird cloud formations, hurricanes--everything. And I love weather. In fact, this morning I walked out the door at 4:36am, and got slammed in the face by a sheet of water--wind and water at the same time! Fantastic.

Reason #2: The ocean. The ocean is everywhere. It doesn't just stay in the giant crater where it lives. It sneaks up through cracks in the sidewalk to tickle your bellybutton, it leaps over the pier and sneaks into your socks, and it has this way of latching on to the air and grabbing you from behind in a damp, salty hug. You can taste it in the fog, you can smell it in the air, and if you're feeling ambitious, you can stick your feet in it.

Reason #3: It's gorgeous. The sky is gorgeous. The ocean is gorgeous. The mountains are gorgeous. The snow is gorgeous. The hills are gorgeous. The countryside is gorgeous. Magnificent, wonderful, glorious, majestic, resplendent, astonishing, splendid, formidable, awesome, breathtaking, transcendent, pulchritudinous, imposing, etc. And you can drive over the ocean!

Reason #4: Pictures like these.

You may have noticed that all of my reasons have to do with water. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a fish. I am, however, made up of 70% water. It's likely that you are too.

The coolest thing about water is probably the giant space ocean. If I were a few million times larger than I am and could live on the edge of that space ocean, watching a billion stars set over a glittering cloud of water vapor so big it could supply 140 trillion Earth-sized planets with oceans and oceans of water, my life would probably be perfect. I might even sell everything I own and buy a space ocean houseboat so I can hang my laundry out to dry by the light of a few galaxies.

That said, if you happen to invent a "make something a million times larger" machine that is shaped like a houseboat, with an "anti-asphyxiation" button and a stick shift that goes 1-2-3-4-speed of light, call me first.

Levi the Cactus Can't Eat Bagels

There is a cactus, who I have good reason to believe has named himself Levi, that has been staring at me for four days. His pot has swirls of blue and orange and white and brown which remind me of a planet that has a lot of iron floating through the sky. Now, I don't understand anything about planetary physics, but I imagine that a planet with a skyfull of iron would probably be quite hot and dry--and Levi would probably like to live there.

Here on Earth we have a skyfull of water, with clouds always moving around and picking up more water and then dumping it on the ground, and we keep loads of it in giant buckets named Atlantic and Pacific, and smaller buckets like Huron and Baikal. I like water because it's romantic to look at street lights in the rain, and because puddle jumping is a delightfully endorphin-releasing activity.

Sometimes I dance in the rain, too. I like to swirl around and pretend I'm flying, as if the floor melts away from under my feet, and all I have left is the strength of my arms and the spinning of the universe to keep me from falling. My hair flies out around my face, and my skirt sparkles in the dim light of the stars, and I dip my fingers briefly into the pansophy of movement, the pansophy of time; I come to a halt and watch the atoms and the galaxies whirl past, but only for a moment because I can't stand to not join in.

Then I hand Levi an umbrella because he drowns easily, and we dance together down the street of Universe City... and then I'm ejected from my daydream because Dave shows up with a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. Yum. It's too bad Levi can't have some too.

A Sad Candle

There are certain types of weather which are perfect for lighting candles. Well, they would be if I didn't buy cheap candles that burn out after only an hour of use.

For example, yesterday the sky was grey and the trees were orange. Rain droplets pelted down from the clouds, smacking the leaves hard enough to make them wave, but without enough force to break them from their parent--more like a slap on the wrist than a spanking. The wind shoved the branches of the trees back and forth, but luckily, trees are able to stand up against most winds.

This sort of weather is not classified as a storm, but more of a wet drizzle with an extra helping of cloud.

A storm looks more like this: a powerfully angry agglomerate of air smashing into the trunks of trees with the force of the Roman Army, so that the trees bow to the majesty of the winds; millions of beads of water falling simultaneously like bombs, exploding painfully as they crash into skin and leaves and dirt; rumbling thunder serenading the fury of world below; spikes of electricity piercing the earth with sparks and fire and pain.

Earth storms can be quite exhilarating. Then the sun comes out, and the blue-skied weather is beautiful once more.

But then the sun storms. These storms are far more terrifying than anything you can imagine. The sun is already a behemothic ball of writhing snakes of fire, contorting and twisting, blazing at fifteen million degrees Celsius. But when the sun storms, tongues of fire reach out into the blackness of space, towards Venus and Mercury and Earth, releasing the same amount of magnetic energy as hundreds of 100-ton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously.

If you were there, you would die.

Our sun will never have the storm of all storms, releasing all of it's energy at once, exploding itself and all surrounding planets and moons into the vast space, where the left over pieces will drift away, eventually crashing into other planets and suns and black holes. Instead it will merely burn out.

Like a sad candle. Which I will then use to light my house when it drizzles.

Moskowitz, Clara. "Giant Sunspot Releases Massive Solar Flare." 4 November 2011. http://www.space.com/13517-giant-sunspot-unleashes-massive-solar-flare.html Accessed 5 November 2011.

"What is a solar flare?" NASA. http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/flare.htm Accessed 5 November 2011.

"Ask an astronomer: is the sun expanding? Will it every explode?" Cornell University. 10 February 2006. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=232 Accessed 5 November 2011.