Good-bye la Nina

Bad Dad does the taxes and I make the tough call of whether we should ski the southern or the northern storm track each winter. Because of the la Nina (a colder than usual pool of water in the equatorial east Pacific near Peru), the northern storm track seemed like a safer bet this year.

But our recent weather doesn't seem like a la Nina. Check out this animation from Unisys.com, a site for professional meteorologists.
See the moisture plume coming from the southwest? That kind of weather pattern can happen any year, but it is less likely during a la Nina year and more likely during an el Nino year. It's like playing with loaded dice. Anyway, that's been happening more often than I would have expected during a la Nina year. (Remember the epic storm in late December?)

Dr Jeff Masters' Wunderblog breaks the news that the la Nina is over.

Take a look at the latest weekly sea surface temperature (SST) and SST anomaly (deviation from climatological mean temps) from NOAA. Notice that the equatorial SST near Peru is slightly warmer than usual this week?
Watch this NOAA animation of global SST anomalies for the last six months. See the waters off the coast of Peru turn from indigo (-2.5 C colder than usual) to yellow (1.0 C warmer than usual) over the last six months? Here's the latest weekly still, but click on the link above to see the full mesmerizing movie.
Hopefully, the abatement of la Nina will bring relief to flood-stricken Australia.

Think snow!

The view from my window

The view from my cot one morning on safari. She was taking a picture of the cape buffalo in the trees. All night long, I heard noises that the guide later identified as hyena, zebra and lion. No wonder they told us to stay inside our tents after dinner until sunrise.
Sunrise over the Serengeti plains, as viewed from outside our tent.
Tent interior. You can glimpse the bathroom area through the door on the right.
Notice the LED bedside reading lamps and the overhead lights. They are powered by a solar panel attached to the roof of each tent and a battery pack under the rear cot.

Hot safari showers are offered each evening before dinner. The water is heated over a wood fire and mixed with cool water in a gravity-feed elevated water bag. A 35 liter bag yields two military showers (turn the water off while soaping, turn it on to rinse) with fantastic water pressure. Showers are at dusk (5:30 or 6) so that the staff can get back to help prepare and serve dinner. It is also not safe for the staff to be in the bush area behind the tents after dusk because of the wild animals.

Dinner is served at 7:30 with drinks and hors d'oeuvres a half hour earlier. They light big torches at the front of the tents and the lodges and patrol the path to safely guide us between the dining tent and our sleeping tent. Then early to bed because the animals are most active early in the morning.

Don't you love the decor? The sinks and water ewers are made with hand-blown recycled glass. The wall hangings and baskets are handwoven in the region. I will post later about our visit to a weaving cooperative that produced the baskets in the Thomson safari camps and about those fantastic wall hangings.

New Threads Downtown

Los Angeles Conservancy gave tours of Union Station today.
Iris was in charge of the camera and it is fun to look at the outing from her vantage point. This is the ticket hall that is normally off-limits to the public.
I showed off a new skirt made with Vogue 1358. Iris and I both love this dark turquoise/teal supplex & nylon blend. It packs well, dries quickly and works with so many items I already own.
Iris wore Kwik Sew 2666 pants made of gray cotton interlock and a white Dharma Trading* smocked top.
I got the fabric for both the skirt and pants at SAS Fabrics in Hawthorne, CA. It's an odd-jobber that sews factory leftovers by the pound. In a way, these are recycled fashions because these scraps would have ended up being dumped at a fiber recycling plant if hobbyists like myself didn't find higher uses for them.

Afterwards, we went to Ocean Seafood in nearby Chinatown for dim sum. Yum!

Clockwise from left to right: house special roast chicken, shrimp with honey walnuts, rice wrapped in lotus leaves, double soy (tofu and soybeans) with mustard greens, congee/jook/shi fun/rice porridge, seaweed salad with home-style sweet pickles.
Kwik Sew has awesome patterns in awful wrapping. Would you be attracted to a pattern that looks like this?
Not many people would, which is why this pattern is now out of print, OOP. But, straighten out the leg flare and this pattern for knits with lycra makes the best fitting pull-on pants. Iris has had 8 pairs of these in her lifetime. I made pair #8 in black last night.

This is the 5th time I made the skirt in Vogue 1358. This time, I cut the front in one piece and the back in two pieces. Iris says it looks much nicer without the front seam. You can see iteration #4 here.

I do sew from new patterns, too. I made a new linen skirt yesterday from Vogue 9414 and will show it off later.

* BTW, if you know me in real life and want to place an order with Dharma, let me know ASAP. I am putting together a group order. Babies are arriving really soon and I can't let them go home without tie-dyed onesies.