happy birthday to me!

A quarter of a century. I can't believe it! (My goal is 93 years)

It was a wonderful day for a birthday, although I have no real plans besides finishing some work for classes. I was surprised at work today when one of the teachers told me I had a package from one of the students I worked with last semester, who is now back in Korea. I was not expecting it, and toted around the box all day, and when I got home, I found this:

I LOVE wind chimes! I don't remember if I even mentioned to her anything about them, but it was a perfect birthday present, along with all of this:

Luckily, there were a few other gifts for some of the teachers, and we can all munch on the sweets together. How very thoughtful of her! 

I remember when I was much younger, my mother gave my sister and me each a decorative ceramic cup with our birth months on them. For some reason I was disappointed because my March cup showed a little girl stomping around in a mud puddle on a rainy day. It always seemed so gloomy to me, but since then I've come to really love spring time and I'm now content with being born in this season!

I see all the tulips and daffodils on campus, or the grass growing tall in the soccer fields and automatically my mind jumps to thinking about how much a horse would enjoy that nice clump of thick grass. Not to mention, once the thunderstorms start, you can look forward to much warmer weather and the amazing sights of the clouds (and perhaps an occasional tornado).

it's officially summer...

...according to both the calendar and the weather. It finally got above 70 degrees here, and combined with the sun, it felt especially nice!

I've been doing much of the same cataloging and researching objects at the museum, except with different collections. After the Oceania collection, I moved on to toy boats-- little clockwork tin model boats from the 1920s to the 1980s. I have to admit they look like fun, especially the submarines. Too bad I can't try them out...

After that came the "medical boxes". I thought museum cataloging couldn't get any worse than arsenic-stuffed taxidermied birds until I opened up one of these and found a Civil War surgery kit, complete with amputation saws. I've seen many of these in museums before, but let me tell you, there is a whole lot of difference when they are safely behind a piece of glass as opposed to just sitting there in front of you. Fail me out of grad school, I don't care, I am not going to take those things out of their box for individual pictures!

I'll skip a picture of that collection and leave you with Robert E. Lee and his pony, Traveller

 Thankfully I have now moved on to lighting. Yes, just lamps and the like: buggy lanterns, whale oil lamps, lighthouse lamps, etc.

old lighthouse lantern

where are those Santa Ana winds?

I really should have checked the climate reading for southern California before I moved here. Then I would have known it is a "Mediterranean climate": an average of 57 degrees in January (sounds good!), but only 72 in August. The only time San Diego really gets a hot streak is when the Santa Ana winds blow from the eastern deserts.

We drove through Phoenix on the way here, and it definitely was a desert-- hot, dry, sunny. Now that I'm on the coast, I've experienced the complete opposite of Kansas weather. I remember once this spring in Kansas when it was below freezing on a Monday, and 90 degrees on that Friday. Here, it's sunny all the time and very consistent temperatures in the 60's.

Still, today was cloudy in the 60's. One of the docents turned on a space heater in the boat's library (I'm not the only cold one!), and for once I felt comfortable. I've been wearing all the layers I brought with me when I go to work, which isn't much considering it's summer and supposed to be hot, or so I thought. It felt so nice with the heat that I was seriously considering going to buy a space heater for my room just so I could be out of long pants and a sweatshirt for once.

I was talking to my cashier at the grocery store the other day about this conundrum, and he told me to "just wait a month". We'll see about that...

good morning!

air show

The Wings Over Gillespie air show was today in El Cajon (I'm learning new Spanish words every day!). I took the trolley to the airport this morning, rather than drive, since I'm making the most of that expensive trolley card I waited an hour in line for. It's got to be cheaper than $4.25 gas though, right? The trolley stop is at one end of the 1.5 mile runway, which meant I ended up walking two more miles to get to the actual spectator area. I did not know this at first. The aerial view on Google maps always makes things look much simpler.

Lucky for me, I found an old veteran man on the trolley who was also walking to watch the planes, so I ended up listening to two miles worth of war stories along the way. He told me all about the importance of the multiple buddy system, and then about how he had been married to a pilot for 13 years before she died in a crash in the mountains-- so sad.

The airshow itself was entertaining, but not as exciting as others I have been to. There were no jets, no aerobatics, no formation flying. Ah well. There's always Kansas City's air show when I get home in August.

At least the weather was beautiful, as it has been since I've been here. It's a lot warmer the farther you get from the coast. Since the maritime museum is on a ferry boat, the space is mostly open to the outside, so there is always a cool (cold?) breeze from the water. I'm usually freezing because of this and so for lunch I walk three blocks inland to Little Italy. There, on one of the street corners, is a nice fountain with black metal benches. These are my heat source, and I feel just as a lizard does as I eat lunch there and watch the tourists roll by on the historical trolley tours and gawk.

corner of Little Italy

just look at them go!

the snowpocolypse

What a fantastic blizzard that was! Still, it did not seem nearly as bad as they made it out to be. I suppose other areas may have gotten it worse. It seems like this winter we haven't been able to get a break between the melting of snow and the coming of even more. Here's a great satellite photo taken by NASA of yesterday's storm:

NASA images 

At work on Monday (with international students whose home countries include quite a range of environments), we had to make sure the students understood just how much snow there could possibly be. Of course the five students from Tibet (a.k.a. the Land of Snows) seemed unfazed, whereas some of the others were in disbelief. At times I wonder if some of these students have any idea what Kansas is really like before they come here. We had to warn them of the wind chill, and frostbite, and what shoes to wear, good socks, etc. I hope they all came out of it alright.

After shoveling the snow in front of the house this morning, I went on a much-needed snow hike, about 6 miles, which felt wonderful after being shut in all day yesterday. It's too bad I don't have cross country skis, because the fields would have been perfect for it! As it was though, the drifts made it somewhat difficult to discern deep and shallow snow. It wasn't uncomfortably cold though, and everything sure was beautiful!