Nick Tingle's Blog

Driving home from campus a few minutes ago, I was stuck at a long light. Soot and smoke debris came in through my open windows. Looking east out the passenger side of the car, I could see smoke clouding the downtown air and smoke clearly rising from hotspots.

Brother Dan and his family live down that way under that cloud of smoke. I expect though that he and his family are safe.

Brother Dan sent a URL for a google map of the fire.  Click here

The thing is not contained. It’s 81 degrees right now at 3:30 pm on Friday, November 14, 2008.

Predictions are the winds will kick up again at sundown, though they are not expected to be as fierce as last night.

Once again my car is covered with ash. Over the last 16 months my car has been covered with ash too many times. Summer of 2007 the Zaca fire went on burning in the back country—with smoke and soot getting to the Coast—for three months. At the beginning of this summer came the Gap Fire right next to us, and now this. By far the most destructive in terms of property lost and panic and fear spread. I expect very few people in the downtown area are not anxious about the possibility of high winds this evening.

Officials speak now as if this “event,” as they have taken to calling it, was “inevitable.” Perhaps like people who build too close to rivers we should not be living here at all.

If you are driving from LA into the Santa Barbara area, you first hit Montecito, then you hit Santa Barbara proper, and then you hit Goleta where Carol and I live.  We are about ten miles from the center of SB.  So we are in no danger from the currently burning Tea Fire.

Still, Carol and I both know people living in the area affected by the fire and at present the fire is moving alarmingly close to the city.  The temperatures are expected to be high but the winds not as high.

Yester evening was strange.  The temp went up as the evening wore on.  Just after sunset it was about 68 but the rose to 75 by the time we were getting ready to hit the hay.

So whether this fire continues its destructive path will be determined largely by the weather.

Every time I drive up in the area affected by the fire I think, Jesus, what if they have a fire.  Huge homes mark the hills and they are surrounded by brush and trees, trees, trees.  And everywhere those damn eucalyptuses that go up like matches.

So for the present Carol and I watch TV (though we must get on with our days) to see what’s happening (so far 100 homes destroyed) and watch the sky get thicker with smoke.

Yesterday, around 9 am Carol called—I was at my office getting ready for class—to say she was stuck in traffic.  Utterly gridlocked, and was now trying to make her way home having had to cancel the classes she was trying to get to. 

Seems a young man had chained himself to an overpass crossing 101, Santa Barbara’s primary traffic artery.  The young man was wearing a ski mask, fatigues, and waving a US flag along with a handgun.  So the authorities shut everything down.

He chained himself to the overpass around 7:10; so all the go to work traffic got jammed up.  Some people were so stuck and the wait so long, they got out of their cars and were talking and doing exercises on the freeway.

Some of his friends called the local TV station and radio stations saying the young man was a veteran of the Iraq war and was going through a really bad time, and, please, the police should not kill him.  And, thank goodness, they didn’t.

I was at school teaching but Carol got back home and was watching events unfold on TV. The police finally had encircled the young man and were about to take him in when—bingo—the local TV station went off the air.  Apparently, as Carol later found out, when she called Santa Barbara City College to say she would not be in—well, that it would make no difference if she came in or not because the juice was out all over that area of town.

Meanwhile, on campus, I go to get a cup of coffee around 9.  Usually the line is 6 to 10 people deep.  Yesterday—zip, nobody.  Maybe students are stuck on the freeway, but mostly I expect they are still in bed recovering from the Isla Vista Halloween drunckoholic event.

45,000 students, from all over the state, showed up this year to jam the streets of tiny IV.  236 were tossed in the tank.   560 were ticketed.  55 needed medical attention, for such things as alcohol poisoning, and two people fell off the bluffs by the ocean.  Both survived but one was seriously injured.

Carol and I live about two miles from IV.  We tossed and turned trying to get to sleep as the night was punctuated by the screams and howls of drunken “revelers.”  Also this helicopter kept circling and circling the area.

Pretty strange…..

Sometime in the spring, I took the Verilux, “Sunlight in a Box,” light bulbs out of my closet office and replaced them with those energy saving florescent ones.  The Verilux bulbs just burned too hot for summer and used up way too much energy.  But just now I took out the energy saving ones and put the Verilux back because they have gone and screwed with the clocks again.  I remember last fall being bothered by the lack of light.  That’s when I bought the Verilux, I think.

I am not the only one screwed up by the clock change.  Right now the cat downstairs is meowing its head off because she thinks it’s time for me to give her kitty-kat treats.  I don’t know when we started giving the cat those treats, little brown chewy things, about the size of a mouse turd.  But we started and she is in the habit now of getting them and let’s you know when exactly it is time for her to get them.

She is supposed to get them around 5:30.  If she doesn’t get them at five thirty, she meows and then stares at you. But she is meowing now at 4:30 because they went and changed the clocks.

I give her six treats each time.  I count them out—not letting her eat them, till I am done counting—one, two, three, four, five, six.  I make a rectangle out of them, three on each side.  I am trying to teach the cat how to count and something about geometry.  But so far I have noticed no increase in her mathematical abilities, though she does apparently know how to tell time…as long as they don’t change the clocks.

I know it’s fall when they go and screw with the clocks, and in the couple of weeks before that I get to thinking, it’s time for my flu shot.  I get all panicky thinking I will not get my flu shot.  I know the Brothers do not entirely favor the flu shots, and other people I have met swear they will never get one because they think they might die if they get a shot.  So far I have not died, though I have been getting a flu shot, once a year for about maybe 30 years.  Honestly, I don’t know if these flu shots work or not; but if I don’t get one I am sure I will get sick and die.  So I got one at the University…that’s one reason I have gotten so many flu shots.  At the University you usually don’t have to wait in line too long.

The only time I got sick from a flu shot was back with Gerald Ford and the swine flu.  They were like advertising, get your shot, get your shot, because it’s the swine flu and if you catch it you are getting to get as sick as a swine.  Isn’t a swine, a pig?

Why didn’t they call it the pig flu?  I supposed swine sounded more elegant.  I think a guy who herds swine is called a swineherd and not a pig herder.

But I got sick from that swine flu for about 12 hours and then it went away just like that.  But some people did die from that flu shot for sure.

That was in 1976.

Well, I am up this year for a merit review at work.
We all sit around—we post-six year or continuing lecturers—and evaluate each other.
Each person being evaluated has to write up his/her own case (at least here at UCSB; this does not seem true of all the UC campuses). We have to write a section on teaching (that’s the most important area); and a section on Program (and Campus) Service; and a section on “Professional Development.” All of these write-ups are called “self-evaluations.”
To write up the one on Teaching, one must go through all of the student evaluations for the length of the period of one’s review. In my case, three years, back to Winter Quarter 2006 (the review will take place Winter Quarter, 2009. That’s next year by my calculations.)
So I spent the better part of yesterday and some part of today reading the number scores students give me and my class. They have two questions to answer on a fill in the blank scantron.
1. Rate the instructor
2. Rate the course
On a scale running from:
Excellent….Very Good….Good….Fair….Poor.
I have to go through each and every class and tally together the numbers for the Excellent, Very Good Categories and put them in a chart. And then I have to add them all together and find an average “score” for any given class. Boy do I hate doing this. And maybe because I do I kept making mistakes with the math part and writing in the wrong numbers in the wrong column…
And then I had to read three years work of what are called “student narratives.” These are sheets of paper on which students write something about you, the teacher, and the course. I had about 400 of these to run through.
Generally, when the comments are not just bland, thin, and relatively indifferent, students comment on me and my classes in overwhelmingly positive terms. But for some terrible reason all I remember is that handful of squeaky wheels (perhaps four or five out of 400) who says things, your class was a waste of time, your class was like being back in high school, your class didn’t teach me a thing and I want my money back.
Stuff like that. Just plain cruel. Mostly comments like these come from students who resent having to take the class at all. It’s not my fault the class is required. And then I turn out not to be their cup of tea—and out comes the venom.
What a day.

I can’t seem to write in the blog these days. Partly I am just wiped out, and along with being wiped out I am just plain irritable or perhaps too easily irritated by all the irritating things that seem to be happening. So every time I start to write something I start feeling pissed off…
For example, I was pissed off—I don’t know what night it was—when I heard a noise in the wall of the condo. I decided to ignore and I did, until Carol noticed it and she got all paranoid.
We had this odd stink in our downstairs pantry utility closet where we keep food on shelves.
Somehow the sound and the stink connected for her, and sure enough when she touched the rug in the pantry, it was damp!
So right then I was ready to blow a cork. Not again. Three times in the last three years we have had significant water leaks. One whole summer the kitchen was a mess as they tried to locate, dig up and repair a leak in the slab. Then there was a leak in the utility closet outside where all the hot water heaters are—and that leak completely wiped out our utility closet. We had those horrible drying out machines in there for weeks. As I recollect we had to leave the condo for a few days for that one. And then there was the leak dripping out down out of the light fixture in my newly created closet office …
And now…
Sure enough I listened more closely to the sound. It was a sort of hiss. The previous leaks had not hissed like that, so I went out to the utility closet but of course it was locked. I was pissed and got a crow bar and was about to rip the door open when Carol showed up with a key.
Water on the Floor! That was a tip off, and just looking at the pipes in there pissed me off. My god a regular Rube Goldberg contraption of copper pipe going this way and that and half of it going nowhere. I wanted to take sledge hammer to the whole mess. Fortunately I didn’t have one.
And there it was! A copper pipe up over my head and almost out of my reach had sprung a pinhead leak—that along with the pressure in the pipe produced a thin straight stream of water about a foot long that was directed at the sheet rock and that had managed to open a hole in the sheet rock as big round as my thumb. So the water, having made the hole, was now going right through the hole and had run down the wall and puddled down below and leaked into our closet.
Man! So a guy came yesterday, maybe it was, and pulled up the carpet in our utility but not the little strips of wood with tacks sticking up in them (to which the carpet is appended), so I step on those in my bare feet and am sure the rest of the evening that I am going to die of tetanus.
But I didn’t because I am still here to be irritated.