Pacific Loon

This Pacific Loon was photographed last May in San Francisco Bay, near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the day of the Golden Gate’s seventy-fifth anniversary. There were thousands of people onshore and hundreds on the water and this bird showed no fear. It looks a lot different then the loons here in the Midwest, the Common Loon.

The remnants of Hurricane Isaac arrived in Saint Louis on Friday morning. It rained off and on through the day and then proceeded to pour on Friday evening. We had planed to go view the bicycling races around Lafayette Square, but it just seemed too wet. Television footage showed that the races did go ahead, but there were almost no spectators.

I work in rooms that are virtually cutoff from the outside world. There are no windows, most of the computers are not connected to the internet and my only phone is not an outside line. Late Friday afternoon, a security officer comes down the hallway announcing that there is a tornado warning. Not knowing any better, we all troop down to the basement. We were on the top floor of a building that has a notoriously bad roof, so there was no messing around.

On our way down, we pass a window and see sunlight coming in. A few of us go outside to investigate. None of the clouds looked like tornado clouds. At which point two things happen, a manager yells at us for going outside in a tornado warning and then a receptionist tells everyone that the warning has expired.

I don’t think that there was any warning in the first place. My radar App, which reports these things, didn’t and no sirens ever went off. What triggered this whole ‘drill’ was a pop-up warning that appeared on those computers that were connected to the internet. The pop-up did mention a tornado warning and if you read no further then mistaken conclusions could be leapt to. If you read the whole thing then what it really said was in the event of a tornado warning, don’t go outside. There were tornadoes later that night, but none of them were in Saint Louis. 😳

On my way home last night I stopped by Schnucks. The college students have returned, so the store was crowded. WashU and SLU draw students from around the country. On exiting, I overheard a pair of students, “It is raining and it’s still hot out. How can that be?” It was only 78 °F, but the humidity was 82%, so it felt ‘hotter’ than it was. All I can say is welcome to Saint Louis boys.

Anne and I walked to breakfast on Saturday morning. Our radar App showed Saint Louis to be at the center of a huge arc of storms. The storms extended from Kansas City to Iowa into central Illinois. None of the storms were particularly close to us, so we felt safe walking to breakfast. One of our neighbors said that her rain gauge had over two inches in it. This is well short of the forecasted rain amounts, but the storm is not over yet. The wind has been a non-event. We went to breakfast and walked home and got back minutes before another downpour began.