First (and only) spring training game

We finally got in a spring training game. Weather has been pretty abysmal throughout March, and none of our scheduled games took place. With all the rain we got yesterday, I wasn’t sure when I went to bed whether we could play today. Fortunately, we could. It was still cold (around 10 °C or 50 °F), but the sun shone the whole time, so it felt nice enough.

I’m in a different team this year than I was last year and I’m playing in a league at one level down. The alternative was to play one level up, because we won the championship last September and earned a promotion to a higher league. I think I’ll have more fun at the lower level, so I opted to switch teams.

I was back at my favourite position for the first part of today’s game: shortstop. It looks like I’ll be playing there most of the time this year. I’ll also spend time on the pitcher’s mound, either in relief, or as a starter if our regular guy is unavailable. I pitched the last two innings today to get some game vibe at that position as well. The results were mixed. I allowed one unearned run the first inning, but my control took an early exit and I could hardly throw a strike the second inning. I’ll have to work on that.

On the offensive side, I wasn’t faring much better. I was too eager in my first at-bat and went fishing on a slow 1-2 pitch for a third strike. I hit a grounder to short the next two at-bats, both of which got booted by the shortstop for a reached-on-error. I ran into another strike-out my last time up when I couldn’t check my swing on a high 2-2 pitch. That came after fouling off four pitches, so combined with the ground balls, the good news is I’m seeing the ball and making contact.

The competition starts next Sunday. This one spring training game will have to do to be ready for it.

“Wrong kind of snow”

Winter weather always seems to cause trouble for the Dutch railways. All train traffic to and from Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second-largest city, was halted this morning–during rush hour, no less–because a series of switches had frozen shut. All railroad switches are equipped with heaters, to prevent exactly this from happening. The heaters should turn on automatically when it gets cold or when it snows, but this time, they didn’t. According to a spokesperson from ProRail, the company that maintains the switches and other railroad hardware, we “got the wrong kind of snow today, so the automated heaters didn’t respond.”

Say what?

“If it’s cold and white, and comes falling from the sky as flakes, then it’s snow,” said a spokesperson from Rover, an independent organization representing users of public transport. And whatever kind of snow it happens to be, you would expect the switch heaters to work. Besides, today’s snow was of a very ordinary sort, weather officials said.

I’m generally quite happy with the Dutch railway system (contrary to Rover, who never do anything but complain), but ProRail really messed things up today. The Rover spokesperson summarized the situation nicely:

“We understand there will be problems with the railroad infrastructure when there’s a metre of snow, or it’s 25 degrees below zero, or there’s a hurricane,” he said. “But a few centimetres of snow in above-zero temperatures should never be the reason for a total loss of railway traffic.”

White Easter

We didn’t get a white Christmas this winter, but we got a white Easter. If my memory is to be trusted, that’s the first Easter snow I’ve ever seen. (There was some snow in the night before Easter in 2001, but it melted away so fast that I never saw it.) It was also the coldest Easter in 44 years, with temperatures hardly getting above 5 °C (41 °F). Of course, winter weather in March is not really a peculiarity, even in the Netherlands. It’s the very early Easter (March 23rd, only one day later than the absolute earliest possibility) that made for this rare occurrence.

After sunny weather for the first half of last week, the weather turned around on Thursday. It rained for most of the day and a northerly wind brought in cooler air. The showers continued on Friday, with some wet snow and hail mixed in with the rain. Temperatures continued to drop throughout the weekend and Leiden got the first real snow on Saturday evening. More snow fell throughout the night to start off Easter Sunday with a modest layer of one, maybe two inches of white. It was above freezing during the day, so the snow was gone by noon. The evening and the night brought another round of snow showers, so Easter Monday looked pretty much the same as Sunday.

Last night, from Monday to Tuesday, was again cold and had a mix of rain, hail and snow showers. Authorities did what they could in salting the roads, but it wasn’t enough. Chaos ensued during the morning rush hour, with cars and trucks slipping on snow- or ice-covered roads. One truck broke through a guard rail on a bridge near Den Bosch and nearly slid into the Meuse river. There were traffic jams for a total length of 888 km (552 mi) at the worst moment, and that’s in a country only twice the size of New Jersey. Dutch rush hour traffic has been worse only once before: heavy snow caused 975 km (606 mi) of queues on February 8, 1999.

On days like this, it’s a good thing I always go to work by bike.

Snow-blind

Snow on the porch

It’s remarkable how many people were cleaning the snow off the sidewalk in front of their home this morning. For whom? Outside of the immediate surroundings of the university, the supermarket and some coffee shops, I’ve only seen four pedestrians since I got here. Judging by the foot steps in the snow on my way back this evening, the sidewalks really do get used very little. So why do so many people go through the trouble of removing the snow?

Weekend: birds, blues and ballgames

My computer is running two models and while I wait for the results to roll out, I’ll grant myself a moment to write about the weekend.

On Saturday, my host, Steve, took me to the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, about two hours from Granville. Along for the ride was Steve’s son Matt, who knows an astonishing amount about military aircraft for someone who just turned five.

The museum hosts about 400 vehicles, ranging from the earliest World War I open-cockpit propeller planes through modern-day stealth fighters. The collection includes several aircraft that played a key role in history, such as the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki to end World War II. There are also a number of prototypes, including several X-planes.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Bockscar” that ended World War II by dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The Consolidated B-24D Liberator “Strawberry Bitch”. An American heavy bomber, the B-24 was produced in greater numbers than any other type of aircraft used in World War II.

Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk at the United States Air Force Museum. This American fighter was used extensively in World War II, by the Americans and their allies alike.

Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk at the United States Air Force Museum. This American ground attack aircraft from the end of the Cold War was the first plane initially designed around stealth technology.

Steve and his wife invited me to a concert by Scott Ainslie in Granville that night. Ainslie is a blues and folk musician, a musical historian and a great story-teller. I’ll admit that blues and folk are not high on my list of favourite musical genres, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the concert. In fact, it wasn’t just a concert, and that’s what made it so much fun. Ainslie told as much stories as he played songs, and he spoke with a passion that made it impossible not to appreciate his tales.

I spent Sunday evening watching part of the first NFL semi-final and the entire second semi-final. Yes, that’s American football: a sport I never understood and never saw more than a few minutes of. (It’s easy to go without American football in the Netherlands, because there are only a handful of clubs and it’s hardly ever shown on tv.) It turns out that the rules are quite simple and once I knew what they were doing, I actually enjoyed watching the games.

The NFL regular season runs from September to early January, followed by a series of play-off games and the big finale, better known as the Superbowl. The Sunday games were effectively the semi-finals, and the winners will play in the Superbowl on February 3rd, the second-to-last night of my visit to the US.

A great fuss was created by the media over the cold weather in which the second semi-final was played. At -1 °F (-18 °C), it was the third coldest game ever in NFL history. However, the only people that were affected by the low temperatures were the FOX Sports reporters. Many of the players only had short sleeves and some didn’t even have gloves. Except for a few instances of cramps, they were doing just fine. The spectators were doing fine, too. I mean, do these women look like it was actually that cold?

Random observations

• One prejudice about the US seems be true, at least in Granville: everyone has a car. During my 90-minute walk yesterday morning, I encountered a grand total of two other pedestrians. Both were elderly people.
• Cars here are less noisy than in Europe. Could it be the automatic transmission?
• I underpaid at the supermarket Thursday night! Not on purpose, obviously, and I only noticed it when I was back at the B&B. I had to pay $15.50, so I gave the lady a $10 bill, a $5 bill and what I believed to be a 50-cent coin. However, I later realized the coin was a quarter.
• Winter weather comes everywhere I go. In November, early snow showers hit Heidelberg during my visit. The temperature never got above freezing while I was in Garching in December. It’s the same in Granville so far: sub-zero (or sub-32 on that other scale) since I got here. It’s -7 °C (20 °F) at the moment and the temperature for tonight is expected to drop down to as low as -18 ° C (0 °F).

Astronomy in Garching

I just got back from a five-day trip to the town of Garching, north of Munich, in Germany, where I was visiting my thesis advisor. Couldn’t I have visited her in Leiden, where her office is two doors down the hall from mine? Yes and no. Her husband, who was also a professor of astronomy in Leiden, moved to Garching a few months ago to become the new director general of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). (ESO is the organization that develops and runs major telescopes such as the VLT [images or text] and ALMA [images or text].) In order to still spend some time together, my advisor took up a part-time professorship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), literally across the street from the ESO headquarters. The reason for my visit was that she had much more time for me this week than in any other week when we’re both in Leiden. In Garching, there simply aren’t any other students or faculty to demand her attention. (Actually, there was one: I travelled to Garching with another student from Leiden.)

The visit was scientifically successful. We pretty much got around to doing everything that we wanted to. There was also plenty of time to enjoy being in a new place and meet new people. Garching itself isn’t much of a tourist attraction, but had enough to keep us going for five days. I went to Munich itself on Thursday with my fellow traveller, and spent a couple of nice hours there.

Some further random observations:

• Travelling to Garching took some more time than expected. We were scheduled to depart Amsterdam at 11:20am on Monday, but the airplane had a delay coming in from Brussels, so we had to wait until 1:00pm. From there on, the journey went fast and smoothly.
• Travelling back from Garching took even more time. The scheduled departure time was 8:45pm, but fog and cold weather caused delays on almost all flights from Munich airport. In fact, many flights were cancelled. We took off with another 90-minute delay and landed in Amsterdam at half past midnight. The luggage came slowly, so we missed the 1:00am train to Leiden and had to wait for the next one at 2:00am. Of course, when we got to Leiden at 2:20, there were no buses anymore, so I had to walk for another fifteen minutes to get home. In hindsight, we should have just taken a taxi from the airport and reclaimed the fare from the Observatory as travel expenses. Oh well… it was a lovely night for a walk.
• The VLT is located in Chili’s Atacama desert, a very dry and barren place all year around. In winter, the surroundings of the ESO headquarters are almost as barren. The difference is in colour: Atacama has red sand, Garching has brownish grey farmlands.
• The ticket machines for the Munich subway don’t accept credit cards or 50-euro notes. On Thursday, that made for some difficulty in getting from the MPE into Munich. I only had two 50-euro notes and some coins, but not enough to pay the 11.80 euro two-way, two-person fare. My fellow traveller was almost out of cash. Of course, there were no ATMs near the MPE, or anyone to change a 50-euro note into smaller units. We ended up walking back to Garching proper to get smaller change at a supermarket. Our advisor just happened to be there as well, and she was very surprised to still see us in Garching.
• It never got above freezing while we were in Garching, marking the longest period of sub-zero weather I’ve been in in quite a few years. It was nice to endure some real winter weather again.
• I’ve heard from a reliable source where the finale of the next James Bond film will be shot. It’s supposed to be a secret, though, so I’ll not divulge any details. Okay, just this one: it’s not Garching!
• A seagull just came swimming backwards through the canal in front of my appartment. It looked very odd, but I’m sure it had a good reason for doing it.

Schnee

It’s snowing!

Not in Leiden, obviously, but it is on the Königstuhl mountain next to the city of Heidelberg, Germany. Near the top of this 567-metre high mountain (1859 ft.) lies the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), where I’m visiting a colleague for a week.

We already got some snow yesterday morning, but at only half an inch, it wasn’t too exciting. The more interesting bit yesterday was the dense fog hovering over the upper part of the mountain. The clouds were hanging so low that they covered the MPIA, and much of the Königstuhl, like a thick grey blanket. With visibility down to about 50 metres (160 ft.), the bus driver must have had a hard time hauling his vehicle up the slopes. Making it even tougher is the fact that some of the roads are essentially single lane, and the bus can only pass oncoming traffic at specific passing places. That can be tricky already in clear weather. Fortunately, no accidents occurred.

This morning, as we started up the mountain, there was quite a bit of white visible amongst the greens and browns of the forest at the top. Ascending further, it turned out to be a lot more than yesterday. A good four inches had fallen overnight, making for a truly beautiful landscape. The road was still in good condition, as it had been well cleared and salted. The clouds are hanging higher than yesterday, so I have a great view from my office now. It’s a shame I have to work today.

Rain, more rain, and a BBQ

Today Leiden probably got the worst rain showers since I moved here nearly two years ago. I had the good fortune of having to bike through some of them. Although hardly dry, it wasn’t too bad yet in the morning when I went to work. It wasn’t pouring down hard either when I rode home tonight. But in between, that’s where the real fun was.

I had a meeting with the parents from one of our baseball club’s youth teams at six, at the baseball field across town from where I work. It’s only about two miles, but it got me soaked thoroughly. It had been raining throughout most of the afternoon, with the storm really picking up around five. By the time I set out, several streets were flooded, with the water sometimes standing more than four inches high even on the pavement.

I turned into one of those streets and poorly underestimated the length of the submerged stretch. At previous streets, I just pulled up my feet and let my momentum carry me through. In this case, I got nowhere close to reaching dry land, so I did the only thing I could do: bring my feet back onto the pedals and carry on, even though that meant submerging my feet at every turn of the pedals. At least I didn’t have to watch where I went anymore for the rest of the trip.

Of course, it was also rush hour at that time, and the heavy rains were badly affecting traffic. Several cars got stuck when the water disabled their engines. Repair services had a hard time getting to them because of all the traffic jams.

But it wasn’t just cars and people that got wet. A fellow grad student had water at all three levels of his apartment. It was seeping in from the street into the ground-floor hallway, leaking through the roof into his third-floor bedroom, and dripping down from the bedroom into his second-floor living room. I hope nothing important got damaged. I was lucky enough that no water got into my apartment.

After the meeting with the parents, I went back downtown for a barbecue with fellow graduate and undergrad students. The people in charge had set up a party tent to keep the grill and the cooks dry, and the rest of the party took place indoors. That worked very well, and we had a good time.

To give you some idea of what things looked like, here are two pictures I pulled from the Dutch news site nu.nl: