a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Sunday comes from Old English Sunnandæg, which is derived from a Germanic interpretation of the Latin dies solis (“sun’s day”). Germanic and Norse mythology personify the sun as a goddess named Sunna or Sól.
– From livescience.com
Today’s high of 104 °F | 40 °C at 5.29 pm was the highest ever recorded for Seattle.
Monday will bring an even higher temperature.
We got to 101 °F (38°C) here in the city today, and it will be even hotter tomorrow and Monday.
Four of us played tennis in the morning until noon or so, by which time it was already 90 °F (32°C). A good time to call it quits.
This weekend is going to be a scorcher for the Pacific Northwest.
I am among the 40% of Seattle households that do not have air conditioning installed. I do have a unit on wheels, that I will set up again in my bedroom.
It was the first full day of the astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
We are just shy of 16 hours of daylight here in Seattle (sunset at 9.11 pm).
It was warm today (89 °F/ 32 °C), but there will be a little respite tomorrow & Wednesday, before the day temperatures go up again.
Here in Seattle it was a very pleasant 76 °F (24 °C) today, perfect for our social tennis group’s Thursday night at Lower Woodland Park.
Mild weather was not the case for the southwest of the US, though.
There’s a high-pressure heat dome hovering over southern California, Nevada and Arizona— with scorching day temperatures as a consequence:
125 °F (52 °C) for Death Valley, CA,
114 °F (46 °C) for Las Vegas, NV, and
117 °F (47 °C) for Phoenix, AZ.
There was a half inch of rain yesterday in the city, and there will be a little more rain tonight. The flowers are from my walk after dinner last night.
We had 85 °F (29.5 °C) here in the city today— very warm for early June.
Cooler weather is moving in from the coast, though.
Jakkals trou met wolf se vrou.
– ‘Jackal marries wolf’s wife’, said in Afrikaans, when it rains while the sun is shining.
There was rain today— and sun, and wind, all at the same time.
My Thursday night tennis was cancelled, but that’s OK. We need a little rain.
The Tuesday & Thursday social tennis sessions for spring / summer at the lower Woodland Park tennis courts, has started.
I was the only one of the 12 in our group playing that wore a mask on the court, and it did not bother me one bit.
It’s impossible to consistently stay 6 feet away from your doubles partner, and we brush by the others as we change sides, or courts. Why be careless, now that I am so close to get my second shot of the vaccine?
From the National Weather Service Seattle @NWSSeattle on Twitter:
Average high temp. in Seattle, April 15-21, 2021: 75.7 °F (24.3 °C)
Normal average high temp in Seattle, July 11-17: 75.7 °F (24.3 °C)
Our little Indian summer has come to a close today (temperatures will drop back to the 60s tomorrow), which is a good thing.
It’s way too early on the calendar to have mid-70s highs.
Firefighters from the Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources have responded to 91 wildfires this last week.
Lljubeljana, Slovenia, had its hottest March day (+25.3 °C/ 77.5 °F) on record, and now its coldest April night on record (-20.6 °C/ -5 °F).
There is going to be harsh frost damage to crops. Plants and insects (also fauna that thrive on both) would be hit incredibly hard, notes Scottish meteorologist Scott Duncan on Twitter.
We got to 61 °F (16 °C) here in the city today.
Late afternoon I braved the rush-hour traffic on I-5, to get to West Seattle for a little doubles tennis.
It’s now optional to play with a mask — outside or indoors (at Amy Yee Tennis Center). I decided to keep mine on until I get vaccinated.
The governor announced today, that here in Washington State, from April 15th on, everyone 16 & older will qualify for the vaccine.
The spring cleaning of the snow on State Route 20 in the North Cascades will start next week. So it’s still going to be a number of weeks before SR20 can be opened to the public.
It was a lovely day (56 °F/ 13 °C), and I chased myself out of the house this afternoon, to go look at the tree blossoms & spring flowers outside.
Tomorrow will be stormy and rainy.
Top to bottom: cherry tree blossoms, wild primrose, asters, magnolia tree blossoms. I hope I have it right! I’m not a flower expert.
Spring arrived this morning at 2:37 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the earliest on the calendar in 124 years. (Reason: the leap year of 2000, and the observation of daylight saving time in the United States).
Here in the Emerald City it was cold (46 °F / 7 °C) and rainy.
co·ro·na
/kəˈrōnə/
From the Latin word corona, mid-16th century, meaning ‘wreath, crown’.
Architecture: a circular chandelier in a church, or a part of a cornice having a broad vertical face.
Astronomy: the rarefied gaseous envelope of the sun and other stars.
Biology: the cup-shaped or trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the center of a daffodil or narcissus flower.
Medical: coronavirus is any of a family (Coronaviridae) of large single-stranded RNA viruses that have a lipid envelope studded with club-shaped spike proteins.
Physics: the glow around a conductor at high potential.
Smoking: a long, straight-sided cigar.
It was only 45 °F (7 °C) for my late-afternoon stroll around the block today, but hey, now there is an hour more of sunshine.
We had sunny afternoons all week and the high touched 60 (15.5 °C) today.
Daylight Saving Time starts tonight in the United States. (‘Saving’ means shifting the day’s hour markers forward, so that the sun ‘rises’ an hour later, and ‘sets’ an hour later).
Pacific Daylight Time = Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) minus 7 hrs.
We had 58°F (14°C) at the high here in the city, and sun all day.
The little crocuses with their flowers have popped out of the ground, just a little bit later than they were last year.
And how do they know when to flower? It’s very complicated. Flowering plants have a master gene called APETALA1 (AP1). A combination of sunlight, soil temperature and water, prompts the AP1 gene to generate proteins, which in turn, switch on more than 1,000 other genes that are involved in the flowering process.
There is a lot of snow on the slopes of Washington State’s mountains this year, in some places already 10% above normal.
These pictures of the Paradise visitor center at Mt Rainier were posted on the Twitter account from the National Weather Service (Seattle) @NWSSeattle.
It was a bone-chilling President’s Day holiday in the Midwest. Texas has ice and snow, all the way down to Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico.
Here in Seattle, the snow is melting steadily. It went up to 43 °F (6 °C) today.
