Having A Great Time Playing FDR!

Having a great time playing FDR in DMTC’s “Annie” (photos from first weekend by Roman M.).

Maybe a Respite

Having a respite from crisis air pollution levels due to the rain. If the fire persists, particulate levels will rise again after the storm passes.

Here are 24-hour averaged PM2.5 concentrations (micrograms per meter cubed) for November at Sacramento's T St. station. Levels are still 1.5 times above the health standard of 35 ug/m3.

Cleaned the Gutters

Tuesday, I finished the annual autumn ritual of cleaning of the gutters. I waited as long as possible to finish this year - a storm of some sort is scheduled to blow in tomorrow.

Because I’m so late this year, I didn’t get to see praying mantises, as I do some years - they like summits of roofs. One year, the gutter yielded a spent bullet, but the only really notable thing this year is the amount of ash on the roof - fallout from 2018’s County, River, Ranch, and Camp Fires, plus whatever lingers from 2017’s fallout. The droughts of this decade have killed so many trees in California that we have annual fire catastrophes lined up for the next 20 years. All hail climate change!

The gutter-cleaning ritual is capped by visiting the summit of my roof, 2.5 stories above the ground, for minor repairs.

Intoxicated Fairbanks Man Breaks Into Library To Read

Open, dammit:

According to library director Melissa Harter, the man “really wanted to read” and didn’t realize the library was closed.

“He wasn’t here very long. He walked in, the cleaning crew said ‘I’m sorry, we’re closed,’ and then he went out the other door,” Harter said. “He was inebriated and didn’t know what he was doing.”

A Museum of Failure

Good intentions, gone bad.

Cubes

Wombat poop:

The wombat, native to Australia, produces about 80 to 100 cubes of poop each night. It is known to deposit piles of dung outside burrows and on top of rocks and logs, most likely to communicate with other wombats, researchers believe.

...But how the wombat produces the cubed shapes is a phenomenon that has puzzled many observers of the furry marsupial.

Researchers, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Patricia Yang, said they have uncovered the digestive processes behind the mystery and presented their findings at the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Atlanta on Sunday.

Rakes