Evanston: still life
Evanston: still life
That unkind photograph actually ran in the NY TIMES at the head of an article, “Coaxing Parents to Take Better Care of Themselves.”
The top photo is a different kind of still life, with shades of meaning if not exactly a pun intended. It includes one of the world’s larger private collections of eye guards--I had a fifth that I must have thrown out--and eye drops from past and present.
The guards were worn at night to prevent Carol from rolling over and accidentally punching me in the eye. I stopped wearing the most recent one last Tuesday.
The collected eyedrops--that sort of has a ring to it, like ‘Collected Works’--The Collected Eyedrops of Webb Chiles, coming soon in a Kindle edition--and ointments followed various surgeries. I’m not sure why I’ve hung on to them. Just sentimental, I suppose. At present I only take the two on the lower left.
All these things have impossible to remember names that I expect were generated by computers, so, wisely, they come with color coded tops. In two more weeks I should be through with the pink and the white and once again become that rarest of creatures: a medication free old man.
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I have five favorites in my WindQuest app: near our condo; Bay of Islands, New Zealand; Mission Beach jetty; off Cape Horn; and in Hawaii.
When I checked two mornings ago, amazingly the windiest was Mission Beach: 29 knots. SE Hawaii Buoy 51004 was second, somewhere in the 20s, but then it is always blowing there. 23 knots at present. And the location near Cape Horn, 55º35‘ South, 64º05‘ West, was third, also in the 20s. It is only blowing 6 knots there now, nearly the same as Mission Beach’s present and typical 5 knots. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal to sail around Cape Horn when you realize that the weather there is just like San Diego’s. Sometimes.
I’ve already written about WindQuest, WeatherMap+ and Living Earth, and I thank James for another excellent app, WeatherTrack, which includes a satellite world view of cloud conditions similar to WeatherMap+, links to eighteen different sources of online weather reports, mostly in the U.S. and U.K., and, best of all, a way to download GRIBs from seemingly anywhere in the world, searching either by map or catalog. One tap. A few seconds download, at least on our relatively fast home connection, and a menu appears with items such as wave height, sea level pressure, wind, etc. Another tap and the chart is on your screen. GRIBs couldn’t be easier.
WindQuest is quickest for current wind conditions.
I like WeatherMap+s ability to change views from wind to pressure to temperature and from overall world view to local.
Living Earth provides a beautiful current view of the globe, a quick way to read simultaneously conditions in various cities and to locate all current tropical storms.
To these WeatherTrack adds easy viewing of GRIBs and links to multiple forecasting and reporting sources.
All the weather you need for less than $20.
Friday, February 22, 2013