La Niña and the Quake

Please don't be alarmed if there's no posting in The Daily Muse for several days. Or even a week. The reason is that things have been going on around here, only some of which are within the writer's control.

The 'within the writer's control' items mainly have to do with his willingness to apportion the time to this blog — time to sit down at this desk and compose a suitable entry that might maintain his readers' interest for a minute or so. The 'outside-the-writer's control' items include the evening periods of inaccessibilty to our Internet provider (a major factor this past week, and a cause for continued annoyance that may cause a long-overdue change); the diurnal obligations that most of us have, such as grocery shopping, meal preparation, feeding and sleeping.

But coming up next week will be a major disruption, when the guest bathroom is being remodeled, and a new floor is to be put on our entrance hall. The project is supposed to last two weeks, so the fellow tells us who will do the job. We'll see.

For the past several days the outside daytime temperatures have been in the mid-seventies Fahrenheit. And even the nights have been in the sixties. We are made to understand through the news media that the reason for this fine weather we've been having on the West Coast is the result of La Niña.

The severe winters we have had in past years, the climatologists tell us, were the result of El Niño, a phenomenon associated with the warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean waters, and the interaction near our shores of those very warm waters with cold Artic air descending from the north. Well, it seems that these things go in cycles, and we are coming in for some years where the Las Niñas, producing the opposite effect in our weather, will predominate.

Where Los Niños could generate terrible flooding and landslides, Las Niñas may be the reason for the spate of wild fires that have threatened homes down south.

And so it goes, the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. And all this happening in Earthquake Country, to boot.

Speaking of which, when I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this past Wednesday to see the Chuck Close portraits, I also saw the exhibition of photographs of the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire. A truly remarkable set of photos.

The centenary of the Quake is April 18, 2006.