Cloudy with a Chance of the Sun’s Wrath Decending Upon Us.

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Photo #656: Red SunLocation Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008

There was a large solar flare a couple days ago. It included a coronal mass ejection that’s heading straight towards Earth. It will hit us only a couple hours after I post this. At least it looks like it won’t cause any troubles beyond overly pretty auroras.

This isn’t always the case.

There has been at least one instance of strong solar flares causing major blackouts on Earth. In 1989, one of these coronal mass ejections took out the power grid in Quebec for nine hours. Smaller solar storms briefly take out radio and satellites on a regular basis.

Pretty impressive for random bits of sun stuff. Pretty wide spread bits, too. By the time the coronal mass ejection (which, as the name implies, is sun stuff from the corona of the sun getting tossed out into space) hits anything, the particles have had plenty of time to spread out.

And up until we humans started working with electricity, the only thing these solar storms did was produce spectacular auroras in areas that normally don’t see them. The Earth’s magnetic field is really good at protecting us from what comes at us from the sun. The lights of the auroras are a side effect of the magnetic field neutralizing those dangers.

But now we work with things sensitive to the fairly gentle power surges that can get caused by what manages to get past the magnetic field. And we’ve put some of those delicate electronics up into space, where they’re less protected (only less, satellites still orbit well within the veil of the magnetic field). So every so often these solar storms cause a bit of trouble, but all in all it’s still minor trouble.

Now, when we finally move off this planet and live away from the protective cradle of Earth’s magnetic field, things will be different. Maybe at that point solar weather will be part of the daily weather reports. Or whatever we have at that point to tell us if it’ll rain.

  

The Lights of Love and Hatred. Or at least like and dislike.

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Photo #655: Chicago LightsLocation Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008

You know, my time in Chicago wasn’t the happiest (something about it ending with a social phobia triggered nervous breakdown), but I still look back on it in a positive light.

It’s probably because it was the last time I was fully independent.

I’ve spent the years since then working on fixing all the mental quirks that caused that nervous breakdown in the first place. My social phobia had been held in control by very flimsy mental structures, sort of like a flood wall built out of random debris that just happened to be at hand. That sort of wall works, in a soggy sort of way, until the flood gets too strong. And then it’s just washed away. I spent years, to keep with the analogy, removing that debris from the flood plain and building a proper wall made out of proper dirt and stone. There’s still some weak spots, places where I all of a sudden realize my social phobia is acting up in very peculiar ways. But at this point, the wall is built, the weak spots are filled in, and I’m getting twitchy about reclaiming my independence.

Which, alas, would be far easier if I’d spent the last six years working full time rather than rebuilding and expanding my brain. Stuff like “Read half the science section at the local library” just isn’t what recruiters are looking for.

I’m not even joking about that statement, by the way. I have read approximately half of the science section. Well, a bit less if you toss in the social sciences, since I focus on the earth sciences. And a bit more if you remove all the books oriented towards helping high school students and younger. And, of course, it depends on the library. My local library has a lot fewer science books than the main branch library, and I’ve hit the main branch a lot. And my local library is currently closed for renovation, so that percentage will likely change when it reopens…

Which, of course, is why I don’t actually put “read half the science section” on my resume.

And wow, I’ve gotten pretty far off of the topic I started on, haven’t I? I went off on one tangent, and then on a tangent to that tangent. Does a tangent to a tangent even truly exist in math? Wouldn’t it just be the same line as the first tangent?

Right, Chicago. I may have been socializing far too much for my poor brain to handle. I may have been without local friends and unable to make new ones due to the social phobia demanding I keep away from people. I may have failed all but one class that semester due to the results of the nervous breakdown (it’s tough to get an A when you can’t go to classes or do certain homework projects). I may have run rather low on money and had to figure out how to buy two weeks of food for $20. But you know, even with all those problems, I still enjoyed my time there.

Now, it’s not the classes or the fellow students that stand out in my memory, like most extroverts would expect. It was the city itself that I enjoyed living in. I’m not sure if I’ll ever live in the depths of a city again (too crowded), but I enjoyed exploring all the unique places and museums, especially the Asian district just north of my place, and taking the train around everywhere was a blast, and finding an excellent Asian bakery that sold these delectable egg tarts just a couple blocks from where I lived, oh my those were tasty…

And even having to stretch a dollar to fit 14 days of food into 20 dollars was oddly fun. I hit the local Asian supermarkets and found noodles and vegetables at far lower prices than the American supermarket I usually visited, and then I had fun really working my blossoming cooking skills…

So yeah, while I’ve been thankful for the safe and loving environment my parents are providing, since it allowed me space to remove all my debris-ridden defenses away from the flood of humanity, I keep dreaming of moving away, finding a place of my own, living life in patterns of my own invention…

  

Ways I’m not Normal #5341

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Photo #654: Navy Pier TouristsLocation Taken: Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008

What does it say about me that the one time I visited Navy Pier, the fancy tourist shopping-and-rides place in Chicago, I just walked through and left?

I barely even slowed down at all.

It’s not that I wasn’t willing to stop, I just didn’t see anything I found worth stopping for. Half the rides were closed because it was the off-season, and while the shops were open and well-populated, not a one of them appealed to me.

Admittedly, I dislike most rides, since g-forces go to my stomach, not my head, so instead of feeling thrilled on roller coasters and the like, I feel nauseous. And I don’t like having a lot of junk cluttering up my life. I live a frugal life not so much because I have little money but because I have little I want to spend it on. And the shops at Navy Pier tended towards knick-knacks and souvenirs and the like. Oh, and fast food. There were a lot of cheap dining places. But I wasn’t hungry.

I only visited because I was enjoying a long walk through the touristy parts of Chicago. I’d been living there for a few months as part of a college program, and figured I should at least see the various famous stuff before I left. I took the train to downtown, and walked semi-randomly until I had seen enough, and then I went home.

I ended up only stopping for photographs in the two hours I walked.

Perhaps touristy spots just aren’t my cup of tea.

  

The Door That’s Barely There

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Photo #653: Ink DoorTime Drawn: November 2006

There’s a concept that gets covered pretty extensively in art classes called negative space.

Negative Space is the space around what you drew. In an ink drawing like this one, well, it’s the white area. There’s also positive space, which is what you drew, the black part. Most people don’t even think of the white space as part of the drawing, but it’s just as important as the rest.

There’s a lot of interesting things you can do with negative space, but the most common one is to imply that a line exists when it doesn’t. If you look at the top of the window on this door, you can see that the line marking the top, well, is barely there. And, of course, the texture of the glass is more implied than shown.

It was that texture that made me stop and make this sketch. This door exists in the studio arts building at the university I attended, and I walked past it hundreds of times while getting my degree. And one day, I had some extra time, and I saw the interesting way the glass texture was lit, and I found what to do with my time.

This was one of the first drawings I’ve done working in pen without any guiding pencil lines, so there are a lot of wobbling lines where there should be straight, and the door isn’t exactly a rectangle. But I managed to get that texture right, with the odd backlighting and everything. And that is what I was going for.

  

The Wind was Still, The Air Cold, The Sun a Glimmer of an Idea…

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Photo #652: Cloudy TreeLocation Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: February 2007

I found this gem of a photo deep in my ancient archives, back before I got my current camera and was using a hand-me-down with very few features.

But it could manage cloudy days just fine. My current camera can’t. If I encounter a day like the one in this photo, where the clouds are barely letting the sun through, creating some really elaborate lighting effects… Well, I just enjoy it and don’t even bother getting out my camera.

Perhaps I should consider getting a new camera sometime. I got my current one, let’s see, when was it…

That’s right. Christmas present, 2007.

…Huh, has it really been six years? No wonder I’m having difficulties with my camera now. There’s some dirt that’s stuck in the lenses that shows up in some of my photos, no doubt caused because the lens cap broke years ago and doesn’t stay on properly.

Ah well, perhaps one day I shall upgrade. Until then, I shall enjoy the world around me, cloudy days and not, and etch the wonder of the world into my brain.