A Strange Recording

"...calculating eyes wrapped in sunglasses.

Ten trucks must have pulled into the labor exchange that morning and another half dozen into the lot at the post office and forty men got work. Condi[Candido] though was the first in line each time, and each time he scrambled up out of the dirt, for nothing. She watched him with a sinking feeling, his look of [eager]ness and hope [as] he disguised the hitch in his walk and tried to hold the bad arm rigid at his side, and [then] the face of rage and despair and the ravaging limp [as he] came back to her.

At 9:30 or so, the fat man wheeled into the lot in his rich long car. Ame[r]ica had been chattering away [about Tepoztlan to take Candido's] mind off the situation -- She was remembering an incident from her childhood, [a] day when a September storm swept over the village and the hail fell like stones [amid] the standing corn and all the men rushed out into the streets, firing their pistols and shotguns at the sky -- But she stopped in midsentence when she heard the crunch of gravel and looked up into the lean shoulders and predatory snout of the patrons car. She felt the living weight of the big man's hand in her lap all over again and something seized up inside her: nothing like that had ever happened to her before, not in her own country, [not in Tepoztlan,] not even in the dump in Tijuana. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of eight, and her parents had [loved] her and she'd gone to school all the way through, and done everything that was expected of her. There were no strange men, no hands in her lap, there was no living in the woods like a wild animal. But here it was. She rose to her feet.

Ame[r]ica crossed the lot in a kind of daze, picturing the bright expanse of that big room with the Buddhas and the windows that laid all the world at her feet, and the money too, twenty five dollars, twenty five more than nothing. The window of the car, threw her reflextion back at her for a moment, then it ceremonially descended to reveal the face of the patron. He didn't get out of the car, but there he was, expressionless, and the beard clipped close round his mouth to frame his colorless lips...."

This recording was left on my voicemail on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 11:19am. I thought it was funny that such a thing was recorded for two plus minutes on my phone. After listening to the voice and the voice inflection, I realized someone was reading to me. But it was too inhuman. Someone had accidentally called me while listening to a book on tape. I couldn't delete it, because it was so strange. It might mean something? A message? I thought about listening to it, transcribing it, and figuring out what it was. Like so many intentions, it was put off. But now I listened to it, transcribed it. After a bit of searching, I found that the excerpt comes from The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I found the actual quote and edited what my transcription showed to reflect the actual text. It's hard to transcribe the spoken word, people!

Well, I've done it. Not sure what it all means - if anything? But a fun exercise nonetheless. Maybe I should read the book, I've heard good things.

El Niño

I wish I had good news. But I don't. Any moment the head honchos at Steamboat Ski Area are going to have to do something terrible. They will have to begin closing runs in January due to lack of snow.

Now I say this coyly as weather is never predictable, but if trends are trends - things ain't getting better. I geekily put together some data and plotted it for comparison purposes. I plotted known El Niño years(1) as defined by some class notes from Dr. Nolan Atkins, some Professor from Lyndon State College, that my dad sent me. I then grabbed some data from the Western Regional Climate Center which compiled snow fall totals by month since the beginning of the 20th Century(2).

I had to repair some of the data as the monitoring equipment missed a few days. If the month was between December and March, I added the daily average for that year's month to the number of data points missed. I also had to get rid of the 86-87, 29-30, and 07-08 years due to serious errors in recording - fucking drunk ass Forest Ranger, hope that guy was fired. I have no idea where this snow depth is measured. But again, my dad sent me the link, so it must be right. Right?

As you can see, the plot on the left shows El Niño years and the plot on the right shows non El Niño years. Plotted on the same y axis scale the bell curve for El Niño years shows much lighter snow than non El Niño years.


(click to enlarge)

Plotted over time for average annual snowfall, El Niño years produce less snow on average. As you can see, the left plot shows El Niño average snowfall at approximately 140 inches a year and non El Niño years trending down from 175 inches near the turn of the century to 160 inches today. So while, that difference isn't huge, it's still less.


(click to enlarge)

Searching for good news, I looked to see if maybe El Niño years produced more snow in the spring months. While it seems that a typical March during an El Niño year may hold up to Marches in years without El Niño conditions, it still doesn't look pretty. NO LUCK! Ouch! I'll be on rock skis all year!


(click to enlarge)

Per Snotel data(3), we are at 69% of average snow water equivalent and 78% of average precipitation accumulation on 1/19.

Start praying people!!! Now that I wrote this, it won't stop dumping 'til March 25th! Bam!

References:
(1) http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter10/elnino.html
(2) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMONtsnf.pl?costea
(3) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/snotelanom/snotelbasin