Hot. Humid. October?

This is what Dover looked like at the start of this week. Blue, clear skies with a selection of fluffy clouds. This is what we expect from Fall; low humidity and comfortable temperatures.

So, what has gone wrong? The rest of the week has been too warm and too humid. Sure it led to a few fog-delays to delight my school-age kids. But I've been running the AC in the Prius again, just to cut the mugginess.

Of course, a cool-inside car cutting through a fog-bound landscape is going to gather condensation, obscuring the view of a dank, gray, misty commute. So I run the wipers. Which just makes it worse.

This isn't the October we ordered.

Hartly's Happy Hippie has a post up this week lauding the arrival of fall. She's a young fashion-plate and looks forward to being able to "layer" this season. I think she's being a bit optimistic. I'm still trying to find some sort of justification for wearing shorts and sandals to work at the Office of Management and Budget.

Meanwhile, the forecast for tomorrow is for temps in the mid-80s. There's talk among my girls of going to the beach tomorrow. The beach?!? This is October, we should be haunting the Punkin' Patch, looking for carvable and chunkable gourds.

Oh well. This too will pass. The temps will fall and the humidity will lift. Maybe this day-long sinus-ache will leave me as well.

Stepping Back Into the Walkability Discussion

A post on mileage in my Prius earlier this year sparked a discussion about the relative walkability or non-walkability of our lives. I was just thinking about that when I wrote my latest mileage report a few days ago.

I had a sense of irony, therefore, when I saw a link this morning to a web site called Walk Score which asks "How walkable is your house?" The site uses Google maps and geospatial data on the locations of things you might need to get to to determine how close things like schools, grocery stores, restaurants and other destinations are to your house and to determine the extent to which you could get by without a car.

Not too surprisingly, even though I live within the City of Lewes, the score for my house is a lowly 34 out of 100. That's in what Walk Score calls the "Not Walkable" range; "Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must."

Downtown Lewes itself is a fairly walkable place, but we are on the outskirts. Of course, I do want to point out that there are schools, a grocery store, doctors, restaurants and the library all within half a mile of my home.

The site is pretty open about what its limitations are. It is not set up to include in its measurement my commute, which is longer than it should be. On the other hand, I do make my drive to and from Dover in a very clean car.

My work location is more walkable, scoring an 84 out of 100. I'm lucky enough to work in the historic center of Dover and can do almost all errands, once I'm there, on foot.

Today, for example, I held a walking meeting with a colleague, on our way to a downtown restaurant, then walked over to DNREC to confer with a few of the IT folks there before walking back to my office to end the meeting. Very pleasant.

So. How walkable are your life's locations?

Lucky Sevens?

This evening I reached 77,777 miles on my Prius. I knew I'd reach this point today; I could see it coming last night. I rolled into all those sevens a bit past 5:00 p.m. I was just north of Milford.

I pulled over, with flashers on, to take the picture.

It has been just over four months since 66,666.

One of My Favorite Web Companies is Tweaking My Favorite Car

I saw a posting on the Official Google Blog yesterday that got me excited about what might be my next car.

In a posting called "A clean energy update," Google launched an effort to enable the development of a plug-in hybrid. As regular readers may know, I love my 2005 Prius and am waiting with some anticipation for the next really cool new green car. This might be it, though it's not yet at "regular product stage."

I thought about posting on the topic yesterday, but held off. This morning, however, I have found another write-up in the project. This one lists the grants that Google is making under its RechargeIT project. One of them will go to the University of Delaware's Will Kempton "for megawatt scale vehicle-to-grid research and implementation planning."

That's one of the cooler aspects of this approach; the idea that excess electricity from the hybrids could be sold back to the grid. And, it's neat to know that part of that work will be done here in the First State. And I think I probably have met Professor Kempton, somewhere along the line. (The name is certainly familiar.)

Too bad this wasn't on the market in time for Father's Day. Maybe next year.

Milestone

I rolled 66,666 miles on my Prius yesterday during the Commute from Hell. I knew I would. But I also knew that I was not going to want to try to catch the moment of sixes with my camera, given the weather and the state of the roads.

So, while I sat, stopped dead in traffic, south of Dover, I took a blurry shot of 66,652 miles. I figure we can all agree to mentally add 14 when we see this photo.

Snow at Last!

It snowed in Lewes, Delaware, this morning. Unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first snow we've seen this season. And it wasn't much, just a healthy flurry of big, fluffy flakes. And we're still within about a week of seeing mid-January temperatures in the mid- to upper-sixties. Odd weather.

It has been a strange winter. Our temperatures have been above normal, and much of the rest of the nation is seeing devastating ice-storms, which may be a result of higher winter temperatures. I believe that colder temps would have made much of that mass of ice simply snow instead, which the American heartland can deal with rather well.

I should say that this is not the first snow I've seen this winter. There were some flakes mixed-in with a very cold rain up in Dover on Thursday. And I understand there were flakes in the skies of New Castle County this week.

Indonesian blogger Dino, newly arrived to study at the University of Delaware, saw what seems like his first snowflakes on Thursday in Newark:

It was beautiful seeing the tiny white snow flake falling from the sky. I tried to take picture of it but my camera can’t capture the tiny white snow flake in the air. It’s too bad because I want to show it to my family in Indonesia.

I did manage to capture a few flakes in a photo this morning. But that may just be because they were the very large, slow-moving sort.

The two snow shots I posted this morning, by the way, are the first photographs that I have posted on-line since January 5. That's a long dry spell for me. My lower back problems, and the resulting sciatic pain, have kept me from my habitual wandering-with-camera walks around Lewes and Dover. I haven't even really felt like photo-exploring from behind the wheel of my Prius, either.

I need to get past that.

The snow fell here between about 8:00 and 8:30 a.m.. As I write this, a bit past nine, the skies are bright and sunny, though a cold wind is blowing.

55555

This afternoon, driving home from work, I rolled 55,555 miles on my Prius. I rolled 50,000 back in June.

I've made a habit -- or tried to -- of snapping pictures when the digits line up. I caught it at 44,444. I missed 33,333. I captured 22,222, but I don't think I managed 11,111.

Maybe with the next car I can be a bit more obsessive.

From The Other Side of The Lens

I got to meet one of my favorite photographers this evening. Kevin Fleming, one of Delaware's best known photographers, stopped by to get a shot of me in my car for a story on commuting for the Delaware Beach Life magazine.

I have become a sort of serial subject for commuting stories over the years. I think it started with Terry Plowman, publisher of Delaware Beach Life, who did a commuting story (I think for the Delawarean) some time back, before he started his own magazine. That story included an off-hand comment about "the Zen of commuting" that caught the eye of a reporter working on Zen thing for the Washington Post some time later.

Recently, a writer working for Terry's new magazine called to ask me some questions for a new story about commuting.

I stayed away from the metaphysical this time.

And so, this evening, I got to meet Kevin Fleming, who came by for a quick photo shoot. He set up a timed exposure of me driving past him in my Prius. The end result looks like it'll be a neat-looking smear of car and background with me, a bit more in focus, behind the wheel.

It was a great pleasure to meet Kevin, and fun to watch him work.

Halfway Through?

I reached 44,444 miles on my Prius this morning. It was just as I pulled out of the driveway, on my way to drop off the recycling.

It's been 268 days since 22,222. I missed 33,333 somehow, but it's been a busy 8 months, 25 days.

Here's an Idea I'd Like Delaware to Consider

In New York, it looks like drivers of low-emission, clean, fuel efficient cars are going to get a discount on tolls. A story on timesunion.com ( Green' cars worth greenbacks on Thruway) says that the state of New York will issue Green Transponders to cars that meet certain efficiency standards and that those transponders will mean discounts on tolls on the New York Thruway. My Prius and I would like that idea to spread.

A Pair of Prii

My car has a twin that also lives at my office building. Mine is on the left; it is the dirtier, more dented, beat-up looking car.

There's a third Prius whose driver works at my building. That one is that nice blue color. It doesn't rank as a twin. I think of it as my car's brother from another mother.

And there is an older cousin, a Honda Insight, that parks nearby.

I think the four of us should get a special parking area.

Odometer Milestone

I rolled 22,222 miles on my Prius today. I noticed while on a back road, so I was able to safely snap a photo. When I rolled 20,000 the other week, I was out on the highway and not able to pull off in time.