Starship Asterisk*

BMAONE23 wrote:
Yea,
Summer finally arrives in Sonoma County. Tuesday 8-24 was 107 (M M M M M Toasty)
Today peaked at 97 at noon but as of 2:30 it is 91 (Warmmmmmm)
(It has been mostly overcast mornings and highs of 70-80 all summer long)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_County,_California wrote:
<<According to the Coast Miwok and the Pomo tribes that lived in the region, Sonoma translates "valley of the moon" or "many moons". Their legends detail this as a land where the moon nestled, hence the names Sonoma Valley and the "Valley of the Moon." This translation was first recorded in an 1850 report by General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to the California Legislature. Jack London popularized it in his 1913 novel The Valley of the Moon.

In the native languages there is also a constantly recurring ending tso-noma, from tso, the earth; and noma, village; hence tsonoma, "earth village." Other sources say Sonoma comes from the Patwin tribes west of the Sacramento River, and their Wintu word for "nose". Per California Place Names, "the name is doubtless derived from a Patwin word for 'nose', which Padre Arroyo gives as sonom (Suisun)." Bowman theorized that Spaniards found an Indian chief with a prominent protuberance and applied the nickname of Chief Nose to the village and the territory. Beeler believes the name applied originally to a nose-shaped geographic feature.>>

• ______ _The Valley of the Moon_ (1913) by Jack London
  
  <<That evening he led her out on the veranda to the telescope, and she
  found herself looking through it at the full moon.
  
  "Somewhere up there in some valley you'll find that farm," he teased.
  
  Mrs. Hall looked inquiringly at them as they returned inside.
  
  "I've been showing her a valley in the moon where she expects to go
  farming," he laughed.
  
  "We started out prepared to go any distance," Saxon said. "And if it's
  to the moon, I expect we can make it."
  
  "But my dear child, you can't expect to find such a paradise on the
  earth," Hall continued. "For instance, you can't have redwoods without
  fog. They go together. The redwoods grow only in the fog belt."
  
  Saxon debated a while.
  
  "Well, we could put up with a little fog," she conceded, "--almost
  anything to have redwoods. I don't know what a quarry of philosopher's
  stones is like, but if it's anything like Mr. Hafler's marble quarry,
  and there's a railroad handy, I guess we could manage to worry along.
  And you don't have to go to the moon for honey dew. They scrape it off
  of the leaves of the bushes up in Nevada County. I know that for a fact,
  because my father told my mother about it, and she told me."
  
  A little later in the evening, the subject of farming having remained
  uppermost, Hall swept off into a diatribe against the "gambler's
  paradise," which was his epithet for the United States.
  
  "When you think of the glorious chance," he said. "A new country,
  bounded by the oceans, situated just right in latitude, with the richest
  land and vastest natural resources of any country in the world, settled
  by immigrants who had thrown off all the leading strings of the Old
  World and were in the humor for democracy. There was only one thing to
  stop them from perfecting the democracy they started, and that thing was
  greediness.
  
  "They started gobbling everything in sight like a lot of swine, and
  while they gobbled democracy went to smash. Gobbling became gambling. It
  was a nation of tin horns. Whenever a man lost his stake, all he had
  to do was to chase the frontier west a few miles and get another
  stake. They moved over the face of the land like so many locusts. They
  destroyed everything--the Indians, the soil, the forests, just as
  they destroyed the buffalo and the passenger pigeon. Their morality in
  business and politics was gambler morality. Their laws were gambling
  laws--how to play the game. Everybody played. Therefore, hurrah for the
  game. Nobody objected, because nobody was unable to play. As I said, the
  losers chased the frontier for fresh stakes. The winner of to-day,
  broke to-morrow, on the day following might be riding his luck to royal
  flushes on five-card draws.
  
  "So they gobbled and gambled from the Atlantic to the Pacific, until
  they'd swined a whole continent. When they'd finished with the lands
  and forests and mines, they turned back, gambling for any little
  stakes they'd overlooked, gambling for franchises and monopolies, using
  politics to protect their crooked deals and brace games. And democracy
  gone clean to smash.>>

beyond wrote:Well, the Weather or not guys have given us upper east coast dwellers a heat wave in September and now they are threatning the east coast with a 4-3-2-rated Hurricane for the end of the week. So if some of us east-coasters disappear for a while, that may be why. Have your umbrella and water-wings ready.

BMAONE23 wrote:hopefully the one following Fiona won't be named Gabriel

BMAONE23 wrote:The east coast is certainly about to get wet with the Earl-Fiona 1-2 punch

owlice wrote:
bystander, why do you have rain and wind? That can't be Earl.

http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/rt/viewdata.php?product=gsc_b12 wrote:

NOAA CIMSS 6.5µm water vapor image

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NOAA CIMSS 7.0µm water vapor image

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bystander wrote:I thought Earl was on the East coast. We have 65 - 80 mph winds and torrential rain.
Thankfully it's moving fast and won't stay around. I don't envy you folks on the East coast.

rstevenson wrote:Earl's eye, if he still has one when he gets to Nova Scotia, will run up the Bay of Fundy, well to the west of where I am, but still we're in for 70–100 mm of rain and winds up to 100 kph here in the capital. Oddly, this tropical storm will cool us off; we've just gone through the hottest three days of the year here.

rstevenson wrote:
Earl's eye, if he still has one when he gets to Nova Scotia, will run up the Bay of Fundy, well to the west of where I am, but still we're in for 70–100 mm of rain and winds up to 100 kph here in the capital.

rstevenson wrote:
Bad though Noel was, it wasn't "the big one". Hurricane Juan holds that record, here at least. It slammed into the middle of the province, in about the best spot it could if it was bent on maximum damage.

I remember looking out my bedroom window at about 11:30 that night, seeing trees bent nearly horizontal, thinking "Glad they're not over the house", and then sleeping soundly through the night. I woke up to several days without electricity, trees down over the entire city preventing vehicular traffic, and a whole lot of people talking to each other as they'd never done before. Almost everything, including the talking, went back to normal ASAP -- the exceptions being the lives of those related to the six who died as a result of the storm.