Yosemite

My father thought it was a wonderful idea to spontaneously go to Yosemite last weekend. The drive consisted of the most insane winding roads. We stayed at the Wanwona Hotel, which my father thought was dandy since Roosevelt and Bryans have stayed there. However, the drive from the hotel to Yosemite Valley, where most of the waterfalls, restaurants, and activities are, was a forty minute drive. I thought this was insane seeing how the hotel was inside the park. Anyhow, other than these complaints, Yosemite Park is well worth the visit. The smooth granite was paved by glaciers. You may choose to rock climb there, but I was a bit frightened by the steepness. So instead, my sister and I biked through all the trails. There were also some interesting facts I learned. Sequoias need fire to reproduce. Light colors against the granite represents new rock fall. The falls do not have water year round. In fact, beginning in the Fall, the water decreases. In the Winter, it all freezes. Then again in the Spring, the snow melts and the process starts again. Water is always changing the landscape of Yosemite, but it is difficult to see and record on the human time scale.

2012

Watching the movie 2012 really reminded me of the recent topics we have been discussing in class. First and foremost I though the movie was ridiculous, the movie resembled “The Race to Witch Mountain.” Yes, some parts of the movie was moving and interesting, however I feel like the movie was just…bad, and not at all like everyone was raving it to be. The problem: the earth was receiving great amounts of isolation, the most ever in recorded history and somehow it caused the core of the earth to overheat. Midway through the movie the earth starts cracking and climatic spurts included magma bursting through the ground and melting buildings. The craziest part was fiery meatballs erupting from a volcano, also known as tephra, as we discussed in class. If anything, this course has given me enough surface knowledge to realize the absurdness of this movie. The ending was great tidal waves, not because the arctic was melting like you would think as the first sign of a warming earth, but because of the heat currents from the inside of the earth that caused earthquakes and movement of the plates. And the funniest part was how L.A sunk into the ocean, somehow the San Andres fault split. Crazy right??

You Can Be So Annoying

Yes, you the weather. I hate the way you turn my hair into a frenzy and flip my umbrella inside out. I hate that I must buy more than a dozen umbrellas to last a year here. It gets quite expensive you know. But you don’t really know because you come and go. Adhem*… I felt I would express my annoyance for the windy, wet weather today since today is yet another tragic day for my third umbrella. True, in Sacramento, the weather is milder than other parts of the world and the average here is well, pretty average. However, it feels that only here does the weather bring death to umbrellas and fries eggs on the cement in the summer. Though, this is not considered too extreme, it does make me realize that weather is quite peculiar. I think we have mostly a warm front here because many of the storms are prolonged and mild verses the cold fronts which are short and violent. I know that wind is caused from high and low pressure systems. Mechanism of wind includes: oceanographic, which is wind pushed over a barrier such as a mountain, frontal, which occurs from fronts of either warm or cold air, convergent, is when low pressure converges and lifts, and convectional, temperature differences occurs for example in plowed fields.

It's Tragic, but I'm Allergic to School

It's tragic, but I'm allergic to School, this school in particular, CSUS. And why do ask? Is it because the parking spaces are repulsive or the professors reek? No. It is the dang trees. What a coincidence that I live in the city of trees, where they are highly valued and planted. I love trees, I’ll admit. They provide many beneficial qualities to the human race. They produce CO2, provide shade, and are esthetically pleasing to the eye. However, I’m allergic to its overwhelming reproductive excesses. Yes, I will say it, tree sperm. Since Sacramento is a Mediterranean climate, we have lovely dry summers and can also have winds due to, I would assume, either convectional or conversional lifting. Nevertheless, this wind blows around all the pollen including up my nostrils. My eyes are constantly watering, I sneeze up a storm walking to class, and when I let up, I am still sniffling. So when my professors and friends ask who broke my heart, I say it was the trees. So don’t mind me when I am popping Claritin pills, although I plan on switching to Sudafed. Though I notice for some reason, in the mornings or when it’s colder, my allergies aren’t bad. This would be interesting to find out.

Spare The Air

It realized today that Sacramento does have great season variability. I remember while growing up, we would have what would be called “spare the air day.” I was young and naïve then, although some may argue this hasn’t changed, but these days always baffled me. I remember the noon duty aids would rally all the children up during lunch and recess to sit under a tree. It took me a long time to understand why we did this. I always thought it was because the pollution was exceptionally high on those days, and somehow by sitting under a tree, we “spared” the air. Of course now I understand that we sat under trees because the weather was extremely hot and you could see what I think is heat radiating from the concrete, I could totally be wrong, but that’s what it looked like. It now makes sense logically why we sat under trees, Sacramento has a Mediterranean climate, and is classified as part of the Mesothermal climates where there is great seasonal variations. We have very, very warm summers leading to certain “spare the air day,” and typically mild winters with precipitation.

Sad, Dark Clouds

Today was a sporadic rainy day. When I woke up there was already complete cloud cover so I knew the weather channel did not lie today. Before I bought an iPhone and discovered “The Weather Channel” application, rain would occasionally take me by surprise. So, I was prepared and equipped with an umbrella today. I had to walk my friend to the union after our geography exam review because she does not share the iPhone way of life and therefore was not alerted to bring an umbrella. There is an app for everything including geography and weather. We chatted about of course the rain. We recalled from class how any why rain occurs. When the water in the air becomes saturated and reaches the dew point, which is 100% humidity, condensation occurs onto particles in the air such as pollution. When the atmosphere can no longer hold up these particles they fall down from the sky. We laughed about how we use to think that rain was caused by some strange magic that turns nice, white puffy clouds into sad, dark clouds that cry. As children, we thought this was why it rained. We went to the same elementary school, so this could be the blame for our distorted childhood belief for sad, dark clouds that cried.

Boreal

I went snowboarding last Saturday at Boreal. When I woke up that morning and peeked out the window to see how the weather was, I noticed there was an overcast. There was almost entire cloud cover and I also noticed it was not too cold. I remembered in class that we had learned about albedo. Since the clouds are a lighter color, the percent of isolation is higher than if it were blacktop. Also because of the cloud cover, the temperature in Antelope was not extreme. In fact it was warmer than prior days where there was no cloud cover. On our drive to Boreal, I could see and feel the temperature drop on the digital thermometer in my car. The temperature fell from 60 to 24 degrees. This is due to the change in altitude as we traveled up the mountain. I literally recalled lapse rate on our drive there and explained to my dad the reason the temperature drops. I told him lapse rate the rate at which air cools as altitude increases. I felt like an annoying smarty pants. Another interesting event that I saw was when we pulled up to park in Boreal’s parking lot, many cars had their windshield wipers sticking straight up in the air to prevent any snowfall from freezing and locking the wipers in place. My dad copied the cars next to us and did the same.