Photocosm

Our Second Consecutive Day Of Fog In A Row In Two Days

 

The front that brought us fog on Monday was back on Tuesday.  It will be replaced by clear skies on Wednesday, and then we're going to receive wind blasts of up to 70 mph in the Oakland/Berkeley hills. 

 

A little mist outside City Hall in the tiny town of Pixarville. 

 

An AC Transit bus in downtown Berkeley. Don't ever expect AC Transit to use electric buses, by the way. They'd have to change their name to DC Transit.

 

 

A parking lot in Berkeley has red globes aglow atop their entrance. 

 

 

Shattuck Avenue looks great when you can't see it so well...if you know what I mean.

 

 

The marina in Emeryville.

 

 

That bird is the Foggy Throated Mumbler Warbler, common to our misty marshes and marinas and malls. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright 2011 - all rights reserved

A Day Without Fog Is Like A Day Without Sunshine

 

Fog this morning on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. Took an early walk just to enjoy the light.

What makes the San Francisco Bay Area special to me? Maybe the fog. I've never lived in a place which had so much of it. Fog is my favorite weather. Maybe it matches my mind early in the morning.

 

I recall vividly the first time I saw fog in California, even if the fog wasn't vivid. I was in the Air Force ROTC program at my college, and I was flown to Vandenberg Air Force Base for my AFROTC summer camp. I caught our bus from LAX and rode north past Santa Barbara to Vandenberg. Sunshine all the way.

 

Marin County

The parking lot of a golf course.

The next morning, all the summer camp ROTC cadets filed out of our barracks for the morning aerobics run, 1.5 miles around an oval track. I expected to see a bright yellow sunrise under deep blue skies.

 

Nobody wants to tee it up right now at the golf course. Meanwhile, blackbirds enjoy their quiet time.

Big Wrong.  Yellow and Blue were someplace else. We marched in formation in thick ubiquitous fog. Somehow we found the ahtletic field, and then we did our aerobics run. As we jogged around the track,  cadets jogging ahead of me disappeared into the mist. They could have fallen off a cliff for all I knew. Hoped that wouldn't happen to me.

This was a moment of confusion. The Beach Boys never sang about fog, they sang about surfing in the California sunshine, but I would learn fast about the real California. If you lived along the coast, mornings were often filled with fog, and then it burned off and you could sing all day long about sunshine and California girls. Apparently, the Beach Boys never got out of bed till noon.

 

This morning's fog also slowed the morning commute. A ten-minute drive from Novato to San Rafael took about forty-five minutes.

When I finally moved to California in 1990, the Bay Area was nothing but blue skies. I thought this was the regular pattern, and the foggy mornings at Vandenberg were something they had to live with down in Southern California. 

Wrong again. Turned out the state was in a drought. A day with blue sky was a day without rain. There was rationing. Within a few years, though, the drought would end and the El Nino rains would commence. That southern California fog which I jogged through once would return in northern California, an atmospheric paradise I could walk through in the morning.

Nice and nice.

 

 

The Baby Bridge Turns 75

 

 

Today is the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge is the most inspiring structure I've seen in the United States, but the Bay Bridge is in some ways a greater achievement.

For starters, the Bay Bridge was finished first. It opened for business today in 1936, and the Golden Gate opened in May of 1937. Which means there will be a 75th anniversary next year for the orange laggard. 

 

The Bay Bridge was built during the Great Depresssion at a cost of $77 million, and connected San Francisco with the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay. For the first time, people living in Berkeley or Oakland did not need a ferry to visit San Francisco. An automobile could drive the 8 miles in a few minutes.

The Bay Bridge was the longest in the world when it opened. It was so long, the technology for its time didn't allow the construction of a single bridge. Instead, it was constructed in four parts. They connect so well, motorists never notice them. The tunnel drilled through Yerba Buena Island was the largest for its time. 

There's a good article at SFGate, with some photos of the construction.

Here are a few more photos I've shot over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 copyright 2011-all rights reserved

Vapor

 

It's only a matter of time before the government is forced to reveal and release their anti-gravity technology. A really long time. Don't expect to see anti-gravity airliners anytime soon, but that's good because it allows us to admire the artistic atmospheric shapings known as contrails.

An airliner approaches from the south, maybe from Los Angeles, and flying north to Europe or Acapulco the hard way. 

The airliner passes Emeryville, California.

 

It passes over a railroad overpass.

 

The contrail spreads out over the eastern shoreline of the bay.

 

We can see the path of the contrail across the northern San Francisco Bay. Maybe they're flying to Seattle for some yummy coffee. The post in the middle was part of two posts holding an enormous banner for a restaurant.

 

A jogger ignores the beauty in the sky.

 

 

The jogger returns. She didn't share my admiration of the sky, apparently. Just as well, joggers who stare at the sky instead of the sidewalk will soon see concrete. Old eskimo proverb.