Portland, OR

This is one of those little things that maybe would have been nice to know before moving to Portland.

There are a LOT of spiders here.

I cannot get close enough to get a good picture of the myriad spiders in my yard/house, but I found this picture as a representation of the spider that lives out my my pumpkin patch.

Hi, scary.

Now, I have come to terms with my own mild arachnophobia, so the spider population here does not bother me so much, per se. I still don’t especially like spiders, but I appreciate the little guys and girls. I mean, come on, Charlotte’s Web taught us that spiders are beneficial and great at PR work, so what’s not to love?

This spider thing was a bit off-putting when I first settled here. And it wasn’t even so much seeing the spiders everywhere, it was the constant walking through spider webs. Seriously, it drives me crazy. I hate the icky way it feels, but then you have the issue of whether or not that spider, whose home you just destroyed, is now on your person and looking for vengeance.

For those of you reading this that are starting to get the willies, it does get easier as you and your new spider friends find each other’s comfort zones. You see, I cannot kill a spider. Okay, that is a lie, I killed a small, pure white spider that came in on some hydrangeas, but only because I had never seen a pure white spider and frankly, it scared the shit out of me. I panicked. And my mom wasn’t here to save me. True story: I spent my childhood (and into my 20’s, I won’t kid myself) waking my mother up in the middle of the night to rescue me from spiders in the downstairs bathroom of our walk-out ranch style house. That’s the real downfall of the walk-out ranch. Bugs find it that much easier to enter the lower portion of the house as they have doors and windows through which to enter rather than finding some crack to sneak in through.

Portland, Oregon, spiders, arachnophobia, Charlotte’s Web

If you did not know, Portland, Oregon is or should be a destination for all “cork dorks” out there.

Oregon is an ideal spot for growing wine grapes, in particular spectacular pinot noir, which is considered the hardest grape to grow and grow well. Don’t get me wrong, other grapes are grown here, including chardonnay, pinot gris, and very good rieslings, but in the world of wine, pinot noir is the crown prince. Cabernet sauvignon may be considered the king, but only in that Henry VIII sort of way. Big, fat, better marketing.

Some people out there may think that Oregon is a little too far north to grow wine, but oh, how wrong you would be. In fact, the northern part of Oregon sits on the famed 45th parallel. That’s latitude, people. Did you know that the Bourdeaux region in France is also along the 45th parallel?

And yes, the 45th parallel is the half-way point between the Equator and the North Pole. Also, the South Pole if you are at 45 degrees South, but if you were at 45 degrees South, you could only be in Argentina, Chile, or New Zealand, and each of those countries also produce fairly tasty grape juice in their own right.

Oregon pinot noir is something special though. There is such a great micro-climate for growing this particular grape, with the Pacific Ocean providing both warmth and rain, but the Coast Range of mountains protecting the vineyards from too much rain. Also, having a nice big river like the Willamette doesn’t hurt either.

So even though I hear many people lament that Oregon never gets hot, you can thank that temperate weather for producing awesome grapes which in turn produce awesome wine.

Portland lies about an hour away from the heart of the wine country out in Yamhill County. There are other areas to the south as well. In addition, you also have the Columbia River Valley wine country within a couple of hours with Walla Walla at the farthest reach.

So, if you are a wine geek, you really should think about an Oregon vacation with Portland as your base. Or if you live here, and have never been out to the seemingly gazillion wineries in the area, I cannot urge you enough to plan a day or a weekend and head out to Yamhill.

Portland, Oregon, Wine, pinot noir, vineyards, wineries, Columbia River Valley, Walla Walla, Yamhill County, Willamette River, Bourdeaux, 45th parallel, south pole, north pole, equator

I know, I am getting pretty good at finding out it is some national something week. This time, it is Air Quality Awareness Week.

A fact: I moved to Portland seeking cleaner air. I have asthma, and the Chicago air was literally killing me. Over the course of three years, my asthma became continually worse living in the city, and I had to make a choice. Luckily, that choice was a no brainer. I had happily moved to Oregon once before, but didn’t stay long as I went back east to finish school because you know, you really need that college degree.

Yes, that last line was sarcasm. I am a blogger after all. That University of Michigan degree has served me well. Well, indeed.

Here is a comparison between Portland’s air quality trends from the last few years and Chicago’s. I am throwing LA in just to laugh at LA.

Portland, Oregon

Chicago, Illinois

Los Angeles, California

I am not picking on Los Angeles. I am simply using LA as the measure for worst air quality in the US, as named by the American Lung Association last year. Don’t get too smug however, as Portland was beat out of the top twenty-five by cities like Miami and Reno.

Anyhoo, the prescribed “activity” for the official National Air Quality Awareness Week is to educate yourself on what causes poor air quality. Woo-hoo, here it is.

Air quality where you live can vary depending on how much air pollution is emitted in your community, how much pollution is carried into your community on the wind, and by weather conditions.

Ozone forms when two key pollutants, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) “cook in the sun.” These pollutants are precursors to ozone formation, meaning they must be present in the air for ozone to form. Particle pollution can be directly emitted (like smoke from a woodstove), but a lot of particles form when gases react in the air. NOx and sulfur dioxides (SO2) contribute to particle formation.

These ozone and particle-forming pollutants come from a wide variety of sources, including mobile sources, power plants, and industries. Natural sources contribute, too: wildfires and volcanoes contribute to particle pollution, while trees and other vegetation can contribute both to particle and ozone pollution.

Weather plays a big role in the levels of ozone and particle pollution in your community. Sunlight and heat, for example, promote ozone formation. Light winds and temperature inversions both can keep pollution from dispersing. And depending on its direction, the wind can bring in more pollution – sometimes from hundreds of miles away. Geography can affect pollution levels too; mountain ranges, such as those in southern California, can prevent pollution from dispersing.

With sunlight being a major factor in ozone formation, no wonder Portland doesn’t have smog, right?

Still, I don’t know. I really wouldn’t consider reading about smog formation an “activity,” but at least we all learned something. You can find more information for tomorrow’s activity by checking out the website here.

Air Quality Awareness Week, air pollution, ozone, smog, Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, California, EPA, asthma

If the clouds do break tonight, you may be in for a treat. The last couple of nights the moon has been in “crescent” mode, that is, it looks like the famous cheshire cat grin.

This cool effect captured by Doug Zubenel in Kansas last month. The odd crescent and shadowed moon effect is called a “Da Vinci Glow.” It was Da Vinci that first explained “Earthshine” which is the cause of this neat-o effect. You can read more about it here, if you’d like. It’s actually an interesting little story.

The moon has been increasing it’s “crescenticity” or “crescentness” or “crescenture” — sorry, I am having a George W. moment — since Sunday night where it was at 2%. Tonight it will be at 12%, so a little bit bigger than a slight sliver that would be a 2% crescent. That last sentence courtesy of Captain Obvious.

In addition to the crescent moon just being kinda cool, tonight the moon moves into conjunction with the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades is a group of seven stars, that actually look like six because two of the stars are in rotation with each other. Here is a great picture of all seven (plus a whole lot more).

Photo by amateur astronomer Robert Gendler via NASA’s website.

If you need help finding the Pleiades –well, other than tonight, that is, as the Moon will be right there next to ‘em– the Belt of Orion kind of points to them. If you find the Belt, go right of the line that the Belt creates, and you will find them. Currently, Orion is in the western sky. I used to think that the Pleiades were the terminal point on the horn of Taurus, but this sky map shows otherwise.

So, at sunset, if you can get a clear view of the Western sky, enjoy the view!

Portland, Moon, astronomy, pleiades, seven sisters, Orion, Taurus, crescent moon, NASA, cheshire cat, science, stargazing

In the last couple of weeks, Portland has experienced some hail or sleet storms. Usually brief in duration, these “storms” contain small hail stones in the shape of, well, they look like Hershey kisses to me. Which I find interesting, because being from the Midwest (Michigan to be exact, and also four years in Chicago), hail stones to me have always appeared to be more round, or spherical.

The odd shape of our Portland hail stones made me wonder why the shape is different from other parts of the USA.

So today, I will pass along the information that I have gleaned from my research into the shape and formation of hail stones in a new feature I will call Science Friday, but not to be confused with NPR’s Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday. Wait, maybe I should call it something else…I know that NPR is brutal when it comes to copyright infringement, as I had a syndicated radio show called “Car Talk“, and boy, that Click and Clack surprisingly do not have a sense of humor when it comes to someone stealing their idea. My knees hurt just thinking about it.

So here is “Science Class Friday.” Yeah, that’ll work.

Hail is normally associated with thunderstorms, but as we have relatively few thunderstorms on the Pacific coastline, we can read that as hail being associated with cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds. Cumulus clouds are formed when moisture is forced upward, and when that cloud is forced even higher upward, then it becomes a cumulonimbus cloud, or a “thunderhead”. This is fairly basic meteorology, from junior high science class, so you are most likely already aware of clouds and their names.

The difference between Pacific Northwest cumulus clouds and Midwestern cumulus clouds is that the PNW has mountainous terrain that forces the air upward, whereas in the MW, clouds form when a warm front meets a cold front. And that warm front/cold front thing also occurs here in Oregon, but add mountains to the equation and you get yourself Portland’s odd weather.

Now, hail is basically rain that happens to freeze. The liquid precipitation becomes hail when it is forced back up into the cloud, rather than falling to Earth. Hail is distinguished from “sleet” or “ice pellets” by size. Hail starts out as an ice pellet, and when that pellet grows larger than a quarter of an inch or about 5 millimeters, it then becomes hail.

Round or spherical hail is mostly associated with small-sized hail. Irregular shapes tend to occur when the hail “pellet” is kept up in the cloud for an extended period of time. This is due to a strong updraft within the cloud or cloud system. Serious updrafts are the result of a serious difference in pressure, with is associated with temperature for the most part.

According to the National Weather Service’s JetStream Glossary, our “hail” may be correctly labeled as “ice pellets”. I failed to measure the hail or sleet or ice pellet when they fell, so I cannot say for certain whether or not we had hail or sleet. But there are some other critera that may come play when defining our icy hershey kisses.

Ice pellets are defined as:

Precipitation of transparent and translucent pellets of ice, which are round or irregular, rarely conical, and which have a diameter of 0.2″ (5 mm), or less. Ice Pellets bounce when they make contact with the ground. It is sometimes called “Sleet”. There are two main types:

1. Hard grains of ice consisting of frozen raindrops, or largely melted and refrozen snowflakes.
2. Pellets of snow encased in a thin layer of ice which have formed from the freezing, either of droplets intercepted by the pellets, or of water resulting from the partial melting of the pellets.

Our ice pellets were more opaque to me, but I guess they could have been defined as translucent, kind of. And the above definition seems to relegate “conical” ice pellets to a rarity. But our ice pellets did indeed bounce and the definition for hail does not include that little tidbit.

Precipitation in the form of balls or lumps usually consisting of concentric layers of ice. A thunderstorm is classified as severe when it produces hail 3/4″ or larger in diameter.

Both definitions come from the National Weather Service, which is part of the NOAA or for all you laymen out there, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ah, our tax dollars at work.

I have found some other definitions for “sleet” that also mention the bounce, so I am now inclined to label our “hershey hail” as sleet.

But wait, I still haven’t figured out why our sleet is conical.

The American Meteorological Society clears all of this rather odd debate up.

graupel—Heavily rimed snow particles, often called snow pellets; often indistinguishable from very small soft hail except for the size convention that hail must have a diameter greater than 5 mm.
Sometimes distinguished by shape into conical, hexagonal, and lump (irregular) graupel.

I think we have a winner. Portland experienced not hail, nor sleet, but rather a graupel storm. When I crossreference the definition of graupel with the NWS, this is what they have to say about it.

Small pellets of ice created when supercooled water droplets coat, or rime, a snowflake. The pellets are cloudy or white, not clear like sleet, and often are mistaken for hail.

Yep, graupel it is. I grew up with hail, indeed, and now I get to experience graupel. Neat.

Portland, Oregon, ail, Sleset, precipitation, storms, clouds, rain, ice pellets, graupel

Tomorrow March 29th marks the second annual “Earth Hour“, an event that started in Sydney, Australia last year, and is spreading all over the world for its second run.

Earth Hour is a sixty minute period (obviously) in which we, as consumers of energy, can curb some of our electricity use, at least when it comes to lighting and electronics. At 8 pm, turn off all of your lights and electronic equipment, i.e. computers, tvs, dvd players, etc. Keep everything off for one hour. Sure, it won’t make that much of a difference in the whole scheme of things, but it is more about making a statement. If we can go an hour without electrical entertainment, why not go without it even more often? Maybe make Earth Hour a weekly event at your house. Go for a walk, plan a candlelit dinner for someone special, or simply sit there in the dark, or twilight depending on the season, and enjoy the night sky.

Also, Earth Hour is meant to show us all that by cutting lighting, we can cut a significant part of our electricity consumption. The California Energy Commission (sorry to use CA, but it’s the first place I found actual numbers) estimates that lighting and small appliances/electronics makes up 25% of our electricity usage. So maybe even if you don’t turn off the lights, you can still do the responsible thing and switch to more efficient lighting choices.

By the way, have I mentioned that Portland is awesome because you can still see the night sky. A city of a million plus, and I can still see the stars. And I don’t live out in the ‘burbs, either. Trust me, you don’t realize how much you can miss seeing the stars at night until you live in a big city with a lot of light pollution. Or even a small town with lots of light pollution. Click on the small map of the Earth at Night below this paragraph for a reality check.

Portland, Oregon is not officially involved in Earth Hour, and yet, Portland, Maine is. Odd. However, we don’t need no stinking “official city” badges on this one, as you can participate on your own. Though I do think it would be super awesome cool if the entire city shut off the lights at 8 pm.

You can check out the Earth Hour website here if you feel so inclined. There are links and more info on what you can do to save the Earth, or at least think you are saving it. The World Wildlife Fund is the uber-sponsor for the event, and it is a great organization that I have been supporting since high school (yeah, I was one of those kids).

Here’s a little video on how it all began.

Earth Hour, Portland, Oregon, Maine, Sydney, Australia, consumers, electricity, electronics, World Wildlife Fund, activism, event

I cannot tell you how happy I am now that gardening season is here! Living in Chicago, Illinois for the past three summers made me appreciate the backyard garden so much more for the lack of one. True, many people have gardens in the Windy City, but unless you own the house, there is not much an apartment dweller can do except container gardening. Don’t get me wrong: Container gardening can be fun and rewarding, but it is not quite like planning a landscape or a full garden and digging a shovel into the Earth.

So today, I would like to draw your attention to something I have only just come across. I have been weeding my garden for the past three or four weeks now, and I have been pulling a large amount of these little plants, that grow out low in a circle from the base stem, and send out taller aerial stems to produce tiny white flowers.

Much like this.

And they grow everywhere. They start out quite small, the size of a quarter, but can become quite large, up to maybe twelve inches. I spent an afternoon pulling them from the cracks between paving stones and the mosses along walks. Little did I know that the Shepherd’s Purse is a beneficial weed for this area.

The little “weed” came from Europe, where it was named for the shape of its seed pods, which looks like a shepherd’s purse I guess. Not that I know what a shepherd’s purse looks like, per se…I will take their word for it.

So anyway, not only is the shepherd’s purse edible — the leaves are good early in spring, before the plant produces flowers. When it looks like this…

Toss into a salad for a mustard-y taste (BTW, the shepherds purse is a member of the mustard family). But, check this out, once the flowers go to seed, the seed pods (the aforementioned purses) become sticky and are useful to catch unwanted insects, such as the hated mosquito. The gangly, leggy mosquito gets stuck in the seeds.

Brilliant! As Oregon can be a bit damp, and standing water is commonplace, why not have Mother Nature provide us with natural, non-chemical-based mosquito catchers?

So before you do what I did, and yank out all of the shepherds purse from your yard, why not wait a few weeks, let them go to seed, just in time for the majority of mosquitoes to hatch and become a blight on this fair landscape…

I was out last night, enjoying the seven o’clock sunset and the mosquitoes are already starting to become ferocious. I am now resolved to go into my compost pile and find the shepherds purses and replant them.

beneficial, weeds, plants, Oregon, garden, gardening, shepherds purse, mosquitoes

I am happy to report that spring has arrived in Portland. To all of my friends back east and north, I am really sorry that you are still under the cover of snow, but I golfed two weeks ago.

The crocuses came up two weeks ago, and yes, it is true that the crocus will bloom with snow on the ground. It is still one of the first signs of spring. In the past, living in the Midwest, I would have to watch until late, late March or more commonly April for the crocuses to bloom…not this year.

These happy little friends greeted me Friday morning on my way to work. I really think that the daffodil is the most cheerful little flower.

I moved into a house in September, so I am discovering daily new and interesting little plants coming to life in my little yard. Lots of lillies are coming along nicely, and I have a veritable sh*t ton of these green little spikes coming up everywhere, and I am so excited to see what they will become. Sure, I could poke around in some books and maybe online to find out what these plants are, but I’d rather wait and see. Funny, I would spend considerable amounts of energy as a child trying to find Xmas presents before the big day, but when it comes to flora, I am more patient than Job. Hmm, odd.

I have to wonder if a bloom time of the last week of February is early, late, or right on time. Maybe I shall consult a farmers almanac. More reports on new blooms forthcoming…

Also, if you did not already know this, Portland is a city that gardens.

Portland, spring, daffodils, farmers almanac