August, and Summer, is Gone

As Sam says at the conclusion of the greatest work of fiction in the English language:

Well, I’m back.

Been back five days, actually. All dreadfully dreary. All work and no play sort of stuff.

The vacation, as one should gather from my prior posts, was one of the best I’ve had in years. Though sleep deprived (still am), though I may have had a tad too much to drink one or two nights (days), we did a lot and had a lot of fun in a beautiful corner of the earth, in a gorgeous little apartment light years better than any hotel room we’ve long grown accustomed to. On the ride back Saturday I was mighty sad and more than a little depressed.

Sunday was fun: a trip to the park and library with the girls. One ran, one played in the woods, and one meditated under a tree. I was not the one running or in the woods.

Began Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (abridged; that’s the ancient war between Athens and Sparta) on the ride home. Got halfway through the 190 pages. But lost interest once back in New Jersey. Set it aside, and continued plowing through Silverberg’s At Winter’s End. Nothing else is inspiring me; I’m slightly down because of that.

Sigh. It’s late and I’m tired. The summer shot by incredibly fast (wasn’t it just the Fourth of July like last week?) and it’s unseasonably mild here. That September nip has been in the air the past couple of days. A tree outside my window at work has multihued leaves already, many fluttering down to the ground. Soon the landscape will be bleak and barren.

Goodbye August. You rushed by so fast I didn’t even get a chance to make your acquaintance …

Tides

Not being a man of the sea (or beach, lake, river, etc.) I find myself fascinated with the pattern of the tides here at Hilton Head. Especially since we’re overlooking the Shelter Cove / Broad Creek section of the Hilton Head sound, just slightly south of the island’s center of gravity. Twice a day the tides come in and out, and it’s so drastic I had to snap some pics:

High tide

Low tide

  

What a dramatic difference in the landscape beyond my window! I asked the in-laws what the height differential was in the tides down here. I vaguely recall reading somewhere in the beginning of Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light that tides on Normandy beach in June of 1944 differed by 24 feet, so I was trying to visualize how that might compare to the island. They guesstimated a couple of feet. Curiosity not sated, I searched a couple of websites until I found what I think the answer is, here. If I’m reading this correctly, the tidal differential is 6.9 feet.

And all due to the difference in the gravitational tug on the near and far side of earth by the moon.

Interesting, no?

N.B.

Here’s a neat little pdf map of the island. It really does look like a sneaker!

Eclipse Anecdotalia

Oh, forgot! What was Hopper’s amateur scientific observations during the overclouded total solar eclipse?

Well, my observances are kinda skewed due to the extremely heavy cloud cover. Ideally, there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky and the ambient effects of the eclipse would be more obviously correlation does imply causation. But not so.

Also, we were not strict Victorian men of science here. I forgot to log the temperature earlier in the day, something I had half a (nerdy) mind to do.

That being said –

The wife had checked the temperature during her morning walk around 10 am. It was 88 degrees. We had presence of mind to re-check during totality, and it was 83 degrees. On a hot summer day, the temperature dropped five degrees from 10 am to 2:45 pm. In fact, it may have actually been warmer when the eclipse started, around 1 pm. Maybe it went from 90 or 91 to 83, a seven or eight degree drop. But that’s just speculation.

Now, concerning the dimming of the surrounding light … purely and subjectively anecdotal, but, I suggested the guesstimate – and the wife confirmed – that during totality it appeared to be dark to us as it normally is around 8:15 at night. (The sun normally sets around here around 8:30 and it’s dark by 8:45-8:50.)

The wind also seemed to pick up, but then again we were on the beach with dark, heavy clouds overhead. It was hard to distinguish what were eclipse effects verses what were impending potential thunderstorm effects. Possibly – probably – we experienced a mixture of both.

Still, though, it was cool, and a little eerie, clouds or no clouds. Though no clouds next time, please.