Smoke and Mirrors?

An investigative team of one was sent out to determine if there was a real fire yesterday or was all that simulated by ... you guessed it ... (If you can't guess it see title above.)

With careful sleuthing I was able to find several locations where there were alleged burnt areas this one allegedly leaping the nearly impenetrable Brentville perimeter. This is un-retouched, on the scene, almost live coverage.

Another view of what is left when you let the smoke out of the grass.

Still another, which has been re-touched but only to add an arrow pointing to our house.
To summarize what I learned by this experience: 1. I found no mirrors so it might have been real, 2. NEVER go on a bike ride (or is that cycle ride?) no matter how close to home with out some tools. The chain broke and with no way to affix the dangling ends I had to walk home. I hate it when that happens.

And Alas a few more pictures of CYCLING.

Thought I'd wrap up my cycling adventure with a couple more pictures and mostly true interpretation.

Here is a rare picture wherein I'm behind Mark. I was mostly keeping him in my dust (what's the matter can't you see any dust). But any way it's an action shot of him moving down the road. A very nice thing about traveling on Good Friday which is a MAJOR holiday here, is the lack of traffic. It certainly was to our advantage.

And this was a refreshment stop Saturday on the way back home. A roadside fruit stand. Now I don't know where you stand on fruit, but we decided to stand and watch a fresh pineapple being cut up for us to enjoy.

And this was a more typical scene - Mark trying to catch up with me. And I also crossed the finish line, arriving home, first with him bringing up the rear.

Don't read this small print: Actually Mark led most of the time. I only crossed the finish line first cuz he stopped to talk to the guards at the Brentville gate allowing me to zoom past him and make a not so photo finish.

A New and so far smokeless day.

I just went out to take a picture of the 'burn area' but from the wall near our house there is no visible evidence (it had gone up in smoke). Dea said that the smoke yesterday filled the Atrium and play fields at school to the extent that PE classes had to be inside. Really too thick for any outside activities.

Though they are unpleasant to go through especially when the smoke is inescapable, it seems to be one of the normal events here in the Philippines and seems to be the acceptable way of dealing with two ongoing problems:

• 1. What to do with the straw left from a rice harvest, and
• 2. How to clear land or get rid of what we don't want like garbage and debris.

On the first - rice harvest residue issue - I had asked the man who made a presentation for Dea's third graders when they visited the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) earlier this school year, if there was something better to do with this by-product of rice production than burning it. 'Of course', he said, 'plow it back into the soil to enrich the next harvest'. Seems like they could do a great service by getting that information to the farmers and getting it out of the research ivory tower. Seems like that would be a win-win-situation.

On the second item, Brentville fortunately has regular garbage pickup but many villages I've been through do not. I've seen them pile the garbage on the side of the street or wherever convenient and simply dispose of it into the atmosphere by the strike of a match.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Not necessarily in the order indicated in the title...
I just came back into the house having taken a few pictures of an out-of-control rice chaff fire just outside of Brentville.

These taken just 20 feet from out front door. You see here the guards keeping watch over the threatening fire. You can see that there is thickly grassed fields right up to the Brentville wall.

Remember the Platters singing Smoke gets in Your Eyes in the 50's. Why do I keep bringing up all these oldies? Guess those are just the memories of life.

Even as I write this the flames have calmed down a bit but we don't stop holding our breath til the fat lady sings. There is so much smoke in the air I closed up the house. It's usually pretty wide open - all the windows and doors. Oh yeah, the temperature today is in the 90's F so I have the AC's on too.

To show how serious they were about this fire they even delivered a fire hose to the rusting hose station at our corner. A while back I asked the head of maintenance why neither of the hose stations had hoses. The best answer at the time was something to the effect that since the Brentville houses are mostly constructed of cement, if and when a fire ocurred they would have time to go buy some. O...K...! But as it turned out maybe they did have some stashed away. Or perhaps decided to go get some since someone cared enough to ask about them.

And finally the Good! This morning I noticed a couple of very colorful blooms in our front yard so I snapped them for you to enjoy. This was somewhat inspired by the beautiful pictures on the Marshall's blog. Eat your heart out Michelle!

These two blue flowers adorn our front yard. (Remember I'm color blind.)

I Stand Corrected!

Corrected, not by any of my faithful readers, (either one of you) but by my reading. I have been misusing the term 'bike' and its relatives. I was just informed while reading some of Sheldon Brown's insightful articles on bicycles (see a link to his wisdom to the right titled "My Favorite Bike Info site" ). According to him " Bikers ride Harleys, people who ride bicycles are cyclists." I don't ride a Harley and neither does Mark so guess a misdirected relationship has to be broken and a new one begun. Sooo... welcome Mark as my 'cyclist' buddy! No longer bikers. Anyway I'll try to do better with my use of terms. We'll see.

More Pictures of The Bike Trip

The towns along the way typically had rather pronounced announcements that you were entering their domain.


Me at Victoria...

Mark at Pila...



And Pagsanjan had two of 'em.

Mark at one...

And me at the other.


Pagsanjan is probably best known for Pagsanjan Falls which you have to take a P660 (about thirteen bucks US) boat ride up the river to see. As you go into the town you pass some rather agressive boat ride marketers. When I drove up to Paete several weeks ago grandson Davis was ocuppying the front passenger seat and had his window down. When a hoard of those marketers virtually attacked (that's an overly exagerated term to describe 'agressive marketing'), they ran up to his open window yelling something indistinguishable. It was so sudden and loud he was a bit taken back and chose to ride with his window up. I think cozying up to a Boa Constrictor later on built his confidence and he was ready to challenge them with the window down as we drove back through the hoard.

Though our 'avowed' intention was to bike on to Paete, we opted to soak in the pool of a hotel in Pagsanjan. Anything to get our rear off those bike seats and our feet off the pedals. I want you to know that we were only seven miles short of the goal. But do you think we cared. (answer=no!)

The lodge where we spent the night licking our wounds. (Ah come on - at least show a little sympathy.)

The rooms...

And looking out from the dining room - down the Pagsanjan River...

Then up toward the falls - I think it is a couple of miles further on.

Can't show you a picture of the pool where we soaked the first couple of hours cuz I had a bad experience with my last camera near (in) the water so chose to leave this one in the room.

Oh! No! Not Another Jeepney...

Sorry. Well not really. I had seen this Jeepney before on a drive south in the Los Banos area of Laguna Province and said to myself "Self, If I see that Jeepney again and have the camera I'll chase it down if I have to in order to share it with you all." Well I did see it again and I did have my camera and didn't even have to chase it down. It was just sitting there beside the road begging me as we biked down the road this past Good Friday.

Check that sign above the windshield (click on the picture to see the bigger version) - Enjoy it especially all you Denver football fans and know that there are Broncos fans 7693 miles away. Could I be one of then??? I'll let you guess.

Typhoons and Bike Rides

Well, Kong-Rey which threatened Guam has pretty much done what was predicted. It swung northeasterly and has dissipated to a Tropical Storm rather than its Typhoon level. It only reached Category 2 level for a short time then began decreasing in strength. Northeasterly is good from PI perspective cuz that's away from where I am.

And speaking of 'direction and bike rides', it looks like I'm heading southeasterly tomorrow with neighbor Mark for a two day ride proportedly toward Paete on the other side of Laguna de Bay. If I make it back I'll report how it went. It's a new thing for me and I feel that I'm up to it. Mark, is a Brent 5th grade teacher. His wife, Trudy, is Dea's co-worker in the third grade. Anyway Mark has been letting me ride his bike, which I made advantageous for him since I fixed it up so it is a bit more comfortable (new seat) and doesn't break down as much (new chain) and shifts more smoothly (cleaned sprockets and adjusted Derailer).

What's a 'Derailer' you ask? Or if you know what it is, 'Why did you mispell it'? A month ago I had no clue myself either what it was or how to spell it. So to quote a source of much of my information about bikes...

Quote from "Derailer, Not Derailleur!" at http://www.sheldonbrown.com/derailer.html
Traditionally, in U.S. usage, the gear-change mechanism we all know and love has been called a "derailleur." This is actually a French word, but it is commonly pronounced in an anglicized manner, as "de-RAIL-er" or "de-RAIL-yur." The actual French pronunciation is more like "day-RYE-EUH" but nobody says that when speaking English. The proper French spelling is "dérailleur," not "derailleur."
The French Ministry of Culture has been on a campaign to purge the French language of the "impurity" caused by the introduction of foreign, (especially English) words into French speech and writing. In an attempt to combat "cultural imperialism", or "franglais" the Ministry has been attempting to banish such terms as "le week-end", "Walkman" (which they mistakenly think is English), "FAX", "Computer", etc. and replace them with special made-up French words. ("fin-de-semaine", "baladeur", "telecopieur", "ordinateur"...)
When you consider how many French words are already in the English language, as the result of real imperialism (William the Conqueror, 1066!) I think it is time to defend the "purity" of the English tongue; you have to draw the line somewhere, and I have drawn it at "dérailleur."
I am on a one-man campaign to replace the foreign spelling "dérailleur" with the English spelling and pronunciation "derailer." I have been using this spelling in all of my writing for some time, and urge others to do the same.The word "derailer" (or "dérailleur") is actually a metaphor, relating the gear change to what happens when a railroad train goes off the tracks. In English, we call this a "derailment," not a "déraillement."
In fact, in the railroad industry, there is an obscure device designed to deliberately derail a runaway rail car. This device has always been called a "derailer" in English, and a "déraileur" in French.

Excuse the digression into technicalities but I just had to throw that in. I could have just said it's the "gear-change mechanism".

So earlier this week Mark proposed that we take an over nighter and that started it. School is out for a 10 day Holy Week Break which Dea is enjoying very much. Our plan is to take the National Highway, which mostly (I think) follows around the big lake. If we make it all the way to Paete which is about 45 miles one way (see my post titled "Some of this ain't wood carvings..." down a bit in this blog) and that remains to be seen, it will be a milestone for me, as my rides up til now have been only daily jaunts of about 10 miles. Mark is not going to be walking however in case you wondered. Since I'm using Mark's bike for the ride, Mark is borrowing Jim's bike. Jim is an Upper School teacher at Brent. Seems complicated doesn't it? But Mark wins again getting the better bike of the two and Jim wins as well cuz while he and his family are off to Boracay, I serviced his bike a bit (most people here don't properly care for their bikes - they leave 'em dirty and rusty). And since I'm the bike maintenance guy around here I thought I'd better work his over before taking to the road and risking a break down. Stay tuned on that as well.

So what started all this 'biking' stuff anyway? Actually it started early last month (see my post titled Food and Bikes) when I got the Manila grandkid's bikes down here to work over. Since then one thing led to another and I'm even thinking of building my own bike. Yup! You heard right! (Or actually 'read' it right). BUILD. But I'm a ways from that point now - just in the learning/research phase.

Back to the bike trip - I intend to capture it with camera and GPS so a future blog post will likely tell you more than you really wanted to know about it. This morning it's raining a bit here so maybe I need to get a raincoat - Oh Yeah! and a bike-trailer to carry everything I should take with. We're planning on a 8AM start.

Typhoons...

First Typhoon of the year, (named Kong-Rey) for the western Pacific is in progress, as of this writing, near Guam. I was alerted to it by an email from the Jaquette's former Guam residents, like many of us. So I went to my storm information sites on the web, which I'll share down further in this blurb, to see what in fact was going on.

Many people have the impression that typhoons, which are simply intense tropical cyclones and go by the name hurricane in the eastern Pacific and the Atlantic, have a 'season'. Actually they don't since, unlike the Atlantic equivalent, they can occur any month of the year. Certainly there is a range of months that the typhoon frequency is more prevalent but there is no month in which they haven't ocurred here in the western Pacific.

When checking out the storm potential I will first go to http://tsr.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/, a web site called Tropical Storm Risk (TSR) and has about as much info as one can absorb about tropical storms world-wide. It presents a graphic world map displaying current TS activity wherein all you have to do is click on the one of interest to zero in on more detail including actual and predicted tracking information as well as strength etc. etc. Please check it out. It's good.

Another site I like is http://www.typhoon2000.ph/micro.html or as the link suggests Typhoon2000. To get the following picture you have to look down a bit on that page for "View Tracking Map" and click on the link. (Note: I added the tag pointing out the location of Guam.)

I would also like to get information directly from the US military 'Joint Typhoon Warning Center" web site at https://www.npmoc.navy.mil/jtwc.html, but alas, they have blocked access from the Philippines - I think because in the past some BAD Hacker (not all hackers are bad according to the most accurate definition) committed his dastardly deed from the PI thereby punishing all its residents. But try it cuz you'll probably be able to bring it up. Also many of the other sites get updated info from JTWC so indirectly as least, the info is available.

And if you like moving pictures and can spare the download time there is one called "Guam IR Loop" http://www.goes.noaa.gov/guam/guamloops/guamir.html. It downloads about 8 infra-red satellite images at 1 hour increments (I don't mean it takes 8 hours to download - though it might if you're still bound to a modem) then replays them in a cyclic order to display the storms motion. It is somewhat limited in its geographic coverage but does cover Guam, The Philippines, Taiwan, Eastern China, and southern Japan. But then why would those of you in Iowa care about typhoons anyway?

Another that presents lots of data is http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/w_pacific/2007/index.html. The "2007" part is for the year and if you edit that to 2006 you will see a collage of last year's storms here in the western Pacific. Looks like a lot - right?

WestPAC storms in 2006

There are other sites I do check from time-to-time but the above are my favorites at this time.

Well, enough of this. I'll undoubedly come back to typhoons when one threatens, and I'm sure there will be some to tell you about. So stay tuned.....