Gents,

JRT,

I didn't take the snorkel gear this trip although that stretch of coast looked ideal. There are ledges and boulders with several types of seaweed. A stream cascades down the cliffs but there is no drainage pollution. Thanks for the welcome back. We were lucky to get some fine days because the weather has again settled in with unprecedented June rain and unseasonable temperatures. Much flooding in many places in England, especially in the north-west.

I will be sending some pics over in a day or two.

Your weather continues to track ours here. While the east has had
a mild winter, ours has been relentlessly dark and rainy, with only
a couple of weeks of letup in May (I'm surprised none of my 3 dictionaries,
UK, US, Canadian, complained about letup as one word). We are now
on flood watch on the Fraser as "pulses" of high water from storm
systems passing over add to the already brimming river. It's warm and
sunny today, but I expect that as with every other day, there will
have been rain before it's over. I've only had to water my garden
for about three days in May.

So far, this has not been too unusual. We get the occasional year
of more than usual wetness (non-residents might not notice the
difference...), but now it has been getting on three years in a
row. We usually make up as much as possible for the ten soggy months
with a toasty July and August, and on the rare occasions where that
doesn't come through, such as 1997, I think it was, and '08 or '09
was almost as bad, then the locals really start to disintegrate.
If you've endured 10 months of unending drizzle stoically waiting
for the sun, and it fails to arrive, that can really get to you.
In such cases, mandatory minimum vacation days and travel to sunnier
climes are a public health necessity.

Folks,

PV1:

It is now confirmed. "Letup" as one word seems acceptable to IeSpell as well. The exercise reminds me of all that money I invested in encyclopedias, dictionaries and other hard cover reference books in the past that have now been replaced in one 'swell foop' by the likes of Google. About the only reason for picking up an encyclopedia these days is to dust it. I think we've lost something there but I'm not certain just what that is. I know, I'll Google that up and see what I can find....

We are squirming like worms in hot ashes at the moment. After a barely noticeable winter and a cool spring, summer weather has finally arrived this week in eastern NC. The sweltering heat came late and we've finally had the high humidity and heat locals are used to enjoying in June so I am therefore encouraged that The veritable sauna of July and August, like little ducks after their mom, soon will follow.

I spent most of yesterday driving from pillar to post in my old non-air conditioned clunker yesterday. This discomfort was mandated by the civil authorities, both county and state, if I wished to get all the requisite forms and pay all the required fees attendant to changing two automobile titles and placing tags on those cars. For this inconvenience I was eventually allowed the great privilege of paying over $200.

No doubt the disappointment of a cool, wet summer makes you long for blue skies and more temperate climes. Considering where you live umbrella days surely must far outnumber the sunny ones. I have always seemed to be happy with either however I have not yet experienced long months of continuous gray with relative humidity expressed in the form of rain drops.

If it is heat in the 90s F. and above we've got it. Hop in a jet and head for the "Crystal Coast" or Hatteras.

As it happens, I'll be hopping in a jet for sunnier climes in a day or two,
still waiting on the details. However checking the weather sites, it looks
like the improvement may be only a bit better than marginal, at least to
start - I have a work trip to Japan which has been hovering over me for
about a month, but has only come in to focus in the last couple of days,
giving me about 48 hours warning, depending when/what the actual dates are
when they are finally revealed. As the temperatures here struggle with lows
of 10 to 13 and highs of 17 to 19, for those moments between the showers,
my destination in Japan, north of Tokyo, shows lows of 17 to 19 and highs
of 20 to 24, with varying probabilities of thunder showers. It will still
seem like a tropical paradise by comparison...

Folks,

PV1:

Sayonara PV1san. My closest and somewhat eccentric neighbor (the one with a huge sailing yacht parked in his backyard) spent many years in Japan. He, like me, was also in the advertising business. According to him it was a delightful experience. My brother-in-law who worked for IBM at the time traveled to Japan on several occasions and he raved about it. The Japanese I've had the pleasure of meeting have been exceptionally polite and interesting people. Had I met them during WW2 the experience might likely to have been different. One was a pilot.

I see that those scientifically curious chaps at CERN are about to announce that the evidence they have uncovered to date cannot absolutely confirm Higgs boson however it will essentially show the footprint of the particle thus, for all intents and purposes, confirming its existence.

It won't make much difference to most of us of course but for fans of "The Big Bang Theory", perhaps with this announcement, Sheldon, Howard, Rajah and Leonard will finally make it to CERN after all?

Dux & Jens:

I have replied to your e-mail. Thanks for writing.

Gents,

JRT,

Many thanks for your pics of sub-aqua merrymaking which has resulted in a request, nay, outright demand for such a collapsable garden container to be installed without delay!

Yep, those CERN results are due out Wednesday but an announcement from the US Tevetron team about their corroborative findings seems to have stolen a little of the thunder from those flogging the Hadron Collider. Is there a historical parallel here? Remember when the Soviets launched a last minute moon shoot to coincide with the Apollo 11 lunar landing?

Well, I have to say, having wandered about CERN and similar
installations a fair amount, they aren't much to look at.
Lots of large pieces of arcane machinery, with pretty much
no moving parts. Huge amounts of activity while they're being
constructed, but once assembled, they look almost abandoned,
with most of the activity most of the time being a small handful
of youngsters sitting about at computer terminals in a small
office space, far from the view of any tourist. And these days,
even that is getting less common, as the shift personnel can
log in from their laptops from anywhere on site. They can make
their way to the various experimental equipment control stations
in the occasional event that an alarm flag indicates some gadget
may need attention, but the rest of the time, they're often just
sitting about working on other stuff while keeping half an eye
on the status monitors.

I suppose the more you know about what goes in to the hardware, the
more interesting it might be, but it's never seemed to me to be
anything worth journeying to view. Now a good telescope, for me
that might be another matter; but even then I know from experience
the hardware is only somewhat edifying. It is the output of the
devices which is inspiring, and such material is available from
any computer screen on the planet, pretty much. Consider this
monster, for example, hours of fun there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NGC_4921_by_HST.jpg

It's much better in the full resolution link, but that may be a bit
of a chug for some net connections, so I separate it out below, with this
caution. It's 4 1/4 Megs:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/NGC_4921_by_HST.jpg

Anyway, most science takes place in the mind. If I consider what I would
expend effort to go and see, or rather experience, well, let's see; my
copies of Win7 have a folder C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT\MCT-CA\ which
contains a bunch of wallpaper images in 1080x1920. Is this universal,
or only for a subset of international versions? (The whole MCT section
is worth a browse, as the images are quite well done, and curiously
feature the US plus the major affluent commonwealth countries only.)
Anyway, if your version contains this collection, have a look at image
CA-wp4.jpg . I was born and raised less than 20 miles from where that
photo was taken, and at least in the summers, it seems to me to be the
best place in the world to be. There are probably a few other places
of that nature which could be found on the other side of the equator
for those times of year when the picture looks more like this
http://xxcmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/BCBR_Day-0_023-DS-e1341149178825.jpeg
(which to be honest is most of it), like say bits of Tasmania and
NZ, that might be nice for a seasonal commute. However, beyond that,
given a nice warm little home and a good net connection, I don't think
there's much that would seduce me away. Especially not a great hole in
the ground filled with tens of tons of arcane hardware.

Folks,

PV1:

I have to agree regarding telescopes. And with larger and larger telescopes being placed into orbit we are looking deeper and clearer into the vastness beyond our own Milky Way to the very beginning seconds of the "Big Bang". BTW, many of the super collider photos I've seen look like an advanced plumbing class gone mad.

Lovely photos there. And to think it wasn't all that long ago that we did not know there were galaxies beyond our own. Things really ramped up when we switched to mirrors. Then radio telescopes showed us far more than we had imagined. I must say that the place where you were born has a stark beauty about it. One could almost envision Viking ships with fearsome prows slicing through the clear, cold water of the fjord.

Indeed be it ever so humble; there's no place like home Dorothy.

Gents,

I would have invested in a good astronomical telescope decades ago but our inclement climate limits viewing to a very low number of nights annually when its use might be considered worthwhile. Just not worth the outlay. Over recent years, prior notice of expected meteor showers always ends in disappointment as did the recent transit of Venus.

Dreams of a mini observatory evaporated long ago along with a planned 12" reflector with all necessary fittings, equatorial mount and drive. My 10X50 binoculars and 88MM birding scope come in handy now and again but they can only be useful for star fields, lunar observation, picking up the moons of Jupiter and suchlike.

JRT, I laughed at the plumbing comment, it is only too true.

Something to note about the fjords of the BC southern mainland: in
summer the shelter provided by Vancouver Island, and the large tides
which during the right phase of the moon leave long stretches of inlet
exposed to cook in the afternoon sun, and subsequently broil the
incoming tide, mean that the water can get quite warm by comparison
to other locations at this latitude, so much so that as teens we
would spend whole days snorkelling without need of wet suits (which we
couldn't have afforded anyway). After an hour or two in the water,
if the water seemed to be finally pulling heat out of us to the
point of discomfort, a 20 minute break to cook oneself lying flat
on the hot rock of the shore such as in the pic would warm us sufficiently
for another excursion.

Dux, Yes, living in a climate like yours, I too have little to justify
the purchase of a good telescope. I think perhaps it was just the rarity of
the view of the night sky that drew my early fascination. I can still
remember the first time I saw a clear night sky, I must have been about
4 and a bit. I knew about stars, I thought, from story books, and I'd
seen one or two, out the window, competing with the house lights and street
lights, but coming home one unusually clear winter evening, from some family
outing, I was stunned to see a whole sky full of stars.

I remember thinking at the time "wow, you mean THIS is what's going
on every night? How have I been allowed to remain in ignorance of this
astounding display?" (or however that might be expressed in four-year-old
thoughts). Well, of course, thinking about it, it would be pretty much
inevitable - in the summer when it's warm enough to allow a small child
out in the evening, at this latitude, twilight lingers past 9pm and I
was relentlessly trundled to bed before 7. And in winter, when it's dark
at 5, it is also pretty much always overcast, and there's no reason to
allow a small child out into that cold dark, anyway. Being outside when stars
were there to be seen was indeed a rare event for me. I remember that night
that despite the cold I just wanted to stay outside with my head up and stare
at the view, but cold tired adults dragged me away.

By the way, my expedition to Japan has come and gone, over the weekend. Much
shorter than expected, but everything worked fine, so no need to stay longer.
It was the long Canada Day weekend, so I've accrued some extra days off.