Every year around this time of year there’s about a week of clear, warm weather. It’s warm weather this year, in the upper seventies during the day, and staying warm until ten or so at night, at which point the thermometer plummets and you remember that it’s late fall after all. I’m no meterologist (though I had aspirations, as I have for practically everything under the sun, at one point), but I suspect this is all caused by a shift in the wind patterns that has replaced our constant sea breezes with a land breeze. I was palpably aware of the difference between those two beasties the other night when I was taking a walk and a gust of air about 15 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature came over the hills from the east. Not only was it warm, but it smelled, musty and a little dank, like the Central Valley, which of course is where it came from.

Speaking of the Central Valley, last Saturday I drove with Clark and Amanda and Jay, a friend of theirs, out to the Mondavi Center in Davis to see a performance by a friend of my three companions, Rinde Eckhart. It was a piece called Horizon, something in between performance art and a play. We made the trip in my 1991 Mazda Navajo, a dear old tank of a car that is enormously fun to drive and whose gas mileage, even though it exceeded my expectations, is something of a sin, if venial, to indulge. Still, its performance on that drive, along with the fact that the transmission isn’t slipping any more, makes me wonder if it isn’t up to a much longer trip, one on which its ability to carry a sizeable proportion of my worldly possessions might make up for its inefficiency.

It’s official: I’m moving to Chicago. I emailed Dan Margoliash on Friday and said I’d like the job. I’m excited about this lab and about the things I will be working on, and they seem to be excited about me, too, which is a nice feeling. I am also happy about Chicago. I love it here in California, and I have made some really wonderful friends, but there’s also a lot here that has frustrated me for years now, and the very possibility of being able to change that has made me enormously happy in the past week.

My friends the ruby crowned kinglets have been flying around the front yard while I write this. I often mistake them for bushtits until I see the male’s red crown, although I’m now discovering that they’re much more acrobatic fliers, capable of almost hovering for brief periods.

(cdm | LandBreezes )