donn@sdchema.UUCP (11/22/83)
Um... No there is one place where they dont say "If you dont like the weather wait a minute" : in San Diego the weather forcast is the same for every day "Fair and mild no rain". Jose Torre-Bueno For the curious, the last few days have been rainy with heavy winds here in San Diego [God's country, of course]. Power was out at UCSD for several hours on Sunday. There was a pileup on Interstate 805 -- slippery roadway, speedy drivers, tailgating, the usual. Why, the weather here is positively miserable: it's been under 70 degrees F (that's about 21 degrees Celsius) for at least three days... It may reach well into the fifties tonight(!). ;-> I could use a good Santa Ana right now... Speaking seriously, if you want predictable weather then visit the equator. I used to live in Jakarta, Indonesia, and although longtime residents sometimes claimed that there was a wet season and a dry season, it was sure hard to tell them apart. Every day had identical weather: sunny in the morning, heavy rain for about 15 minutes in the afternoon, clear in the evening. The time the rain arrived was a function of how far you were from the mountains. In the mountains it rains in the morning, if you are out at sea it rains in the evening or night. Every day ran the same length, and it was brought home to you by the fact that twilight lasts only a few minutes. You might be staying late at a friend's, having a conversation, and mention that it was getting late and you had to be home before it got dark; if you then wasted any time exchanging farewells, well, you better have remembered your flashlight. In this country it's no big deal that you travel a few degrees in longitude and the time of sunrise and sunset shifts by a few minutes. In Indonesia this can be a considerable surprise, since you get so used to having the sun go down at exactly 6:15, or 6:05, or 5:59, or whatever. Temperature stays pretty constant and depends on your altitude much more than on the time of year -- high 20s (C) on the coast, low 20s (C) or teens (C) in the highlands. People from the States always complain about how terribly boring the weather is in Indonesia; in Bali, there's never any fall when the leaves change color, never any snow for sledding, never any spring for new flowers, etc. Of course they never mention the blizzards, the freezing rain, the hurricanes, the tornadoes, the battle for daylight savings vs. standard time and so on. You can tell where my sympathies lie... Wishing I was sunning myself at Kuta Beach, Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn 32 52' 30"N 117 14' 25"W (619) 452-4016 sdcsvax!sdchema!donn@noscvax