Living In the World, Not on It

I know at some point I mentioned that there are e-mails that I receive once per day outlining all the seismic activity logged around the world. The e-mails are always one week behind. The earthquake must not have been too hard to see coming that created the tsunami that whacked Japan... on this first report dated 9 March, the red is the 7.2 magnitude foreshock that hit the Honshu area after several days of much smaller foreshocks. Here is the e-mail I received for 9 March 2011: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NO. 1-075 GEOLOGICAL SURVEY MAR 16, 2011 NEIC/WDCS-D QUICK EPICENTER DETERMINATIONS UTC TIME LAT LONG DEP GS MAGS Q SD GAP STA F-E REGION AND COMMENTS HRMNSEC MB Msz USED MAR 09 013034.0* 19.476S 171.700E 81? 4.7 C 1.1 121 28 VANUATU REGION 014749.4 52.880N 160.670E 50 4.5 A 0.9 162 54 OFF E CST KAMCH...

I love spring and quite frankly after the non-stop brutality of this winter, I need spring! But with the warmer air, the flowers and the longer days comes the flood waters. And they are here. Big time here. Lake Hiawatha and lower Parsippany are under 4 to 5 feet of water and Wayne - well, damn! It is crazy how high that water gets. We had a couple of trips to St. Clares ER and the St. Clares Lake had taken over the lower parking entirely and some of the mid-level parking. Not pretty. (Just so you know, there is no such thing as St. Clares Lake - it's the Rockaway River snaking by behind and to the side of it.) New Road was closed (and smelling quite lovely with the sewage plant so close by). The wall of the Lake Hiawatha lower area was holding the river at bay but only by inches. I understand the water is receding, but April is known for its wet weather and if we get any more snow and it melts as the piles of it mostly have now, the rivers will be up again. It's always Wayne ...

I am gratified and amazed at people's response to my leaving the workforce. I'm sad to go but I have to look out for my health (what health, you ask - not much of it!) first, and everyone respects that. And I have made friends for life with my most recent wonderful place. I hate to leave. The name of this post is a line from a Coldplay song, Rush of Blood to the Head . I really love the song and the line is appropriate to my feelings about this working thing... well, this not working thing. The gods only know I've had plenty of time to get used to the idea. I guess it is just such a radical departure from my life - I've been working since I was 15 - and that is a strange, scary, daunting thing. I suppose it is a good thing overall. This winter has stomped all over and has not hung me out to dry - I have to think this will dramatically improve when the warmer weather comes - so maybe it won't kill me so much. (Fat chance - it won't stop because I needn't be s...

It's tough to know how long this will last, although I have two weeks of the work life left... who knows how much I will be doing... and how much there will be to write about. Maybe my life will suddenly go from 65 miles an hour to zip and there won't be anything to say. Fat chance. The condition of the human race is to - in general - communicate. I am very much a communicator. So there will always be something to speak of, gripe about, rave over... etc. There is so much going on in life. OK, so I'm closing one chapter, and that is not easy. But I'm also looking forward to the next chapter, and we will see how that goes. I feel optimistic but reluctant to run into it at the same time. Been working so long, I really don't know how to do anything else. And there is that whole identity thing. So much is wrapped up in what one does rather than who one is. What's the first, maybe second, question that comes up in a conversation with a new person? "Oh, what do yo...

Eeeeeiiiiuuuwwwww! Read on... 'Here's some news to make your skin crawl: Bedbug infestations will explode this year, particularly in the summer, experts say. The bloodsuckers are already entrenched in the city and, like cockroaches, tend to thrive in July, August and September, said Jeffrey White , a research entomologist for Bedbugcentral.com . "I firmly believe that this year is going to be worse than last year," White said at a bedbug seminar Wednesday. "If we combine the seasonal trend, with the bugs getting more and more embedded in our community, that allows the bugs to make that resurgence all the more stronger." Nearly 7% of adults in the city - 404,000 people - reported bedbug infestations in 2009, the Health Department said. While cities are particularly vulnerable to bedbugs, even remote areas like Alaska have reported an 800% increase, White said. "It's not just a New York problem,...

Yes, I've been more noticeable by my absence that my usually witty and urbane thoughts on this or that. Except for articles posted once in February and a few yesterday and this morning, I have not been around or online to digress or empty my monkey mind. Which is still screaming and scratching at its groin. I suspect it is not swinging through the trees, as that takes more energy than I can muster. My health is suddenly deteriorating very, very quickly. In the last two or three months, I've been getting more tired a lot more quickly and in the last two or more weeks, I'm having flare-ups almost daily. So when I get home, I take my "before I go to bed" nap. I usually hang out in my sky chair and maybe I watch the telly, but more often I read. Reading is much more worth it. Not that the telly is so bad, but it will never be as good as a book. So my last day of work is 18 March. A little weird, a lot unhappy, but also a wealth of relief. I've been pushing myself ...

GREENBRIER, Ark. – The central Arkansas town of Greenbrier has been plagued for months by hundreds of small earthquakes, and after being woken up by the largest quake to hit the state in 35 years, residents said Monday they're unsettled by the increasing severity and lack of warning. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded the quake at 11 p.m. Sunday, centered just northeast of Greenbrier, about 40 miles north of Little Rock. It was the largest of more than 800 quakes to strike the area since September in what is now being called the Guy-Greenbrier earthquake swarm. The activity has garnered national attention and researchers are studying whether there's a possible connection to the region's natural gas drilling industry. The earthquake activity varies each week, though as many as nearly two dozen small quakes have occurred in a day. "You don't know what to expect. It's unnerving,"...

A trip around the world reveals that time isn't a synchronized science by John Gettings and Borgna Brunner At 2 a.m. on March 13, 2011, groggy Americans will turn their clocks forward one hour, marking the beginning of Daylight Saving Time (DST) . The federal law that established "daylight time" in the United States does not require any area to observe daylight saving time. But if a state chooses to observe DST, it must follow the starting and ending dates set by the law. From 1986 to 2006 this was the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, but starting in 2007, it is observed from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, adding about a month to daylight saving time. (See: New Federal Law .) No More Sunlight in Arizona and Hawaii Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii and the territories of Puerto Rico , Virgin Islands , Guam , and American Samoa are the only places in the U.S. that do not observe ...

A year after revitalizing the once-sleepy, now red-hot tablet market with the original iPad, Apple surprised absolutely no one Wednesday by taking the wrapper off a slimmer, trimmer version of the wildly popular slate, complete with a front-facing camera for video chat (finally!) and a souped-up processor. The new iPad 2 took the spotlight during a press event at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with none other than Apple CEO Steve Jobs—who is still on medical leave , mind you ("he looks good," Engadget noted on its live blog )—taking the stage to unveil the much-anticipated follow-up to the best-selling original. The "dramatically faster" iPad 2 boasts a dual-core A5 "system on a chip" processor under the hood, said Jobs, good for twice the CPU power and nine times the graphics performance of the original while maintaining the same 10-hour battery life. Also new: dual cameras (at last), including a front-facing camera for VGA-quality v...

By Ben Patterson – Mon Feb 28, 2:54 pm ET We're just a few short hours away from getting our first look at the long-awaited, next-generation iPad—or that's what we're expecting, at least. Indeed, with all the leaks, rumors, and wild guesses we've been hearing in the past months about the next iPad, it's easy to forget that Apple hasn't even officially announced the thing yet, much less doled out any details or pictures. Since we still have a little time to kill before Apple ends the suspense (the iPad event is slated for 10 a.m. PT Wednesday), let's go ahead and summarize what we know, what we think we know, and—most importantly—what we definitely don't know about the iPad 2. What we know The original iPad is still the only iPad, for now: Like I just said, Apple has yet to announce, acknowledge, make veiled references to, or even hint at a new iPad. Well … strike that: during Apple's most recent quarterly earnings call, Apple COO Tim Cook told anal...