The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest
author: Cliff Mass
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/09/15
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves: environmentalism, history, non-fiction, read-again, science, reference, local, own
review:
Cliff Mass is the go-to guy for weather in this region; I’ve been reading and enjoying his blog for a while. This book is an amazing compilation of just about everything weather in the Pacific NW. Learned lots and lots about how our geology affects the weather, as well as some good basic meteorology, the physics of clouds, etc. Has a great chapter on understanding what you see in the sky, and doing some amateur prediction of your own.

Fascinating history, too, with lots of the disaster storm stuff that’s just crazy to read; the book is new enough that it even has the windstorms of ’06 and the flooding of ’07, but also includes amazing weather events all the way back into the 19th century.

Oh, and plenty of beautiful/weird pictures and helpful graphics.

A bit dense in places, but overall fantastic. I want a copy of my own!

edit: received as Christmas gift from Mom. (2011?)

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest
author: Cliff Mass
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/09/15
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves: environmentalism, history, non-fiction, read-again, science, reference, local, own
review:
Cliff Mass is the go-to guy for weather in this region; I’ve been reading and enjoying his blog for a while. This book is an amazing compilation of just about everything weather in the Pacific NW. Learned lots and lots about how our geology affects the weather, as well as some good basic meteorology, the physics of clouds, etc. Has a great chapter on understanding what you see in the sky, and doing some amateur prediction of your own.

Fascinating history, too, with lots of the disaster storm stuff that’s just crazy to read; the book is new enough that it even has the windstorms of ’06 and the flooding of ’07, but also includes amazing weather events all the way back into the 19th century.

Oh, and plenty of beautiful/weird pictures and helpful graphics.

A bit dense in places, but overall fantastic. I want a copy of my own!

edit: received as Christmas gift from Mom. (2011?)

Small-Batch Baking

Small-Batch Baking
author: Debby Maugans Nakos
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2012/01/03
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves: cookbook, non-fiction, didnt-finish, own
review:
Only made 3 recipes: apple oatmeal muffins, brownies, chocolate pound cake. But they were all very good. Very nice to have recipes for very small amounts, since I love to bake but there’s only two of us! I think I’m probably going to pick up a copy since this has to go back to the library.

[edit: received for Christmas 2012 from Mom. Have since made a couple of different cookies: an indifferent oatmeal and a very good peanut butter, as well as a tasty chocolate pudding cake.]

Small-Batch Baking

Small-Batch Baking
author: Debby Maugans Nakos
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2012/01/03
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves: cookbook, non-fiction, didnt-finish, own
review:
Only made 3 recipes: apple oatmeal muffins, brownies, chocolate pound cake. But they were all very good. Very nice to have recipes for very small amounts, since I love to bake but there’s only two of us! I think I’m probably going to pick up a copy since this has to go back to the library.

[edit: received for Christmas 2012 from Mom. Have since made a couple of different cookies: an indifferent oatmeal and a very good peanut butter, as well as a tasty chocolate pudding cake.]

meanwhile…

[Apologies to my non-D&D-playing readers.]

Trying to remember/work out how long it’s been since the player characters in the D&D game have been off on their current adventure, and what might have happened elsewhere in the area in the meantime. They left their supposed stronghold (Quasqueton, from the module B1, Into the Unknown) and went off to find out who the bugbears were meeting in the middle of the Spiderwood on the night after the full moon. That evening they freed a bunch of people who were being sold into slavery by cultists. IIRC then they walked thru the forest towards Orlane — the elf ranger took the frailer people from that group to Hommlet — then camped out overnight in the woods at the edge of town. Over the next day they scouted, got the townspeople to a safe(ish) haven at one of the inns, and that evening at sunset approached the temple that had formerly been dedicated to the corn goddess…but which had been taken over by snake cultists. They’ve been at it in there probably a good chunk of the night: took out the guards and some dire wolves, along with a pair of ninjas, then went inside and battled some mid-level clerics & ninjas, fought a bunch of huge poisonous snakes, then went upstairs: bugbears throwing rocks, an incredibly ineffective ninja, some really nasty skeletons, and an insane cleric. (Sometime in there, they were rejoined by the elf ranger.) While they were fighting that last guy, a bunch of town cultists (plus some low-level yuan-ti) came up behind them to try to take them out. They’ve got the last one, who has promised to lead them down to the caves where the “snake queen” lives. So that’s a couple of hours, max? Which really makes it still in the middle of the night on the second evening after they left Quasqueton.

Joan and her faithful militia have spent those two days cleaning up Quasqueton…and on Joan’s part, thinking about her future there. They’ve probably fought off another incursion of those damn fool goblins.

The force that’s come from down in the civilized lands (the guys with banners that the party saw on the other side of the river) is taking advantage of the brief break in the rain to work their way across the river to reach Hommlet…unless of course a force from one of the other powers has arrived. In which case interesting things may be about to happen.

In Hommlet, the refugees from Orlane are trying to find a little peace, though still worrying about their friends and family — those who are trapped or fighting as well as those who have been sucked into the cult. They have stories about the fighting prowess of those who saved them…as well as schisms they may have seen, and a certain…callousness…towards the dead. They have a decision to make about whether to try to return to their homes or to abandon that town to the swamp and remain in Hommlet. At the same time, work continues on the palisade enclosing the town, Rufus and Berne directing their workmen to help those enlisted by the village elders. Some in the town grumble about the lack of action to face the horror that engulfed the abandoned Keep and wonder whether a simple wall will do any good, should it come to them.

And what of Emirikol, lieutenant to the vanquished cleric of chaos? What of the goblin tribes? Were the last of the bugbears vanquished when the party cleared the cave below Quasqueton, or do still more lurk in the forests and swamps? Who were those slaves ultimately to be traded to, and where were they bound? And of course: what of the so-called Snake Queen below the old temple, and what terror does lurk in the abandoned Keep?

[ok, that actually kind gets me fired up for some D&D…or maybe to write some cheesy fantasy. Or a little of both.]

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
author: Charles C. Mann
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/11
date added: 2013/02/12
shelves: non-fiction, history, biography, ebook, economics, environmentalism, sociology, wishlist, read-again
review:
So many fascinating aspects of this book. I think I’ll want to read it again at some point to absorb more of it, since I basically inhaled most of it over the course of two or three days. In short: all about what he refers to as “the Columbian Exchange” and how to led to the “Homogecene,” ie, the modern age when ecosystems blend together and cross over. He ranges back and forth all over the globe, and from the dawn of the exchange (Colon himself!) up through the years to the present. (Most of it seemed to be in the “colonial” period, 16th-18th century.) Different sorts of malaria and malaria-bearing mosquitos; potatoes and sweet potatoes. Chinese migrants to colonial Mexico making replicas of Chinese pottery to sell in Europe. (Kicker to that story: now the Chinese are making copies of that style. Imitations all the way down.) Enormous colonies of Indians and escaped slaves, a few even recognized as mini-states. And traditions of slavery among Indians and Africans, and how those got tangled up in extractive industry.

The most curious bit of history, for me, was the Little Ice Age — which I already knew of, but had assumed it was related to volcanos or sunspots or something. Turns out that while those things were factors, another major factor was reforestation. All throughout the Americas, land had been cleared by fire set by humans — in Central America, for at least two thousand years. But with the beginning of the Columbian Exchange came smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever, and that killed off plenty of people who never saw a European or African. So the fires stopped, and it was like the opposite of the climate change we’re facing now. Then the cold itself (along with flooding and drought) caused social upheaval in Europe and China, which led to more human craziness, etc., etc.

Fascinating stuff, and I feel like I’ve just got the surface of it. Very highly recommended.

[Final bit of trivia: at the end he goes looking for the place where the Spanish first landed in the Philippines. Turns out it’s a village with the same name as one of my very good friends in high school.]

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
author: Charles C. Mann
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/11
date added: 2013/02/12
shelves: non-fiction, history, biography, ebook, economics, environmentalism, sociology, wishlist, read-again
review:
So many fascinating aspects of this book. I think I’ll want to read it again at some point to absorb more of it, since I basically inhaled most of it over the course of two or three days. In short: all about what he refers to as “the Columbian Exchange” and how to led to the “Homogecene,” ie, the modern age when ecosystems blend together and cross over. He ranges back and forth all over the globe, and from the dawn of the exchange (Colon himself!) up through the years to the present. (Most of it seemed to be in the “colonial” period, 16th-18th century.) Different sorts of malaria and malaria-bearing mosquitos; potatoes and sweet potatoes. Chinese migrants to colonial Mexico making replicas of Chinese pottery to sell in Europe. (Kicker to that story: now the Chinese are making copies of that style. Imitations all the way down.) Enormous colonies of Indians and escaped slaves, a few even recognized as mini-states. And traditions of slavery among Indians and Africans, and how those got tangled up in extractive industry.

The most curious bit of history, for me, was the Little Ice Age — which I already knew of, but had assumed it was related to volcanos or sunspots or something. Turns out that while those things were factors, another major factor was reforestation. All throughout the Americas, land had been cleared by fire set by humans — in Central America, for at least two thousand years. But with the beginning of the Columbian Exchange came smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever, and that killed off plenty of people who never saw a European or African. So the fires stopped, and it was like the opposite of the climate change we’re facing now. Then the cold itself (along with flooding and drought) caused social upheaval in Europe and China, which led to more human craziness, etc., etc.

Fascinating stuff, and I feel like I’ve just got the surface of it. Very highly recommended.

[Final bit of trivia: at the end he goes looking for the place where the Spanish first landed in the Philippines. Turns out it’s a village with the same name as one of my very good friends in high school.]