I wrote the below post sometime around June 11, but didn\u2019t get around to posting it until a month later.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Been quite a while since I\u2019ve posted anything about what I\u2019ve been up to lately. Some assorted notes on that topic:<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Kam and I went whale-watching on Monday [June 8], in Monterey. Alas, the only marine mammals we encountered were orcas (two matriarchial groups, hanging out together\u2014a total of eight orcas). I\u2019m not particularly fond of orcas (I had been hoping for whales and\/or dolphins), and I felt like they were slacking on their main job of attacking yachts.<\/p>\r\n
(\u2026I\u2019m amused by the social-media notion that anti-capitalist orcas are attacking billionaires, but I should acknowledge that the Iberian orca attacks<\/a> have included attacks on fishing boats and other relatively small vessels.)<\/p>\r\n (Wikipedia adds: \u201cResearchers have also suggested that the [boat-attacking] behaviour could be a fad. Other such cultural phenomena among orcas have been short-lived, such as in 1987 when southern resident orcas from Puget Sound carried dead salmon around on their heads.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n Anyway, our guide seemed to take a certain amount of glee in calling them killer whales<\/i> (as in \u201cthere\u2019s a reason that they\u2019re called killer whales, you know!\u201d) (quote is approximate), and in the fact that while we were nearby, the orcas killed and ate a seal. (I didn\u2019t see it happen, but the guide apparently did.)<\/p>\r\n On past whale-watching trips, I\u2019ve loved just being out on the water, regardless of whether we saw whales. But last time I went whale-watching, I got a little seasick (more vertigo than nausea), which made the second half of the outing unpleasant. This time, I took a Dramamine at the start, but it turned out to be quite old (long past its expiration date). I didn\u2019t get seasick, but I could feel seasickness impending (as the six- to eight-foot swells rocked the boat), so I spent much of the trip staring grimly at the horizon to stave off problems. Turns out that staring at the horizon (even literally as opposed to metaphorically) is tiring!<\/p>\r\n It didn\u2019t help that I had left my jacket in the car. As we left the car, Kam suggested that I bring it along, but the sun was bright and warm, and I had a light sweater, and I did my usual thing of failing to imagine that weather could change. I knew there would be wind, but I thought I would be fine, temperature-wise. What I wasn\u2019t expecting was for the sun to be obscured by dark grey clouds for much of the time we were on the water. Which in addition to making things uncomfortably cold (not awful, just colder than I was expecting), also cast a bit of a shadow on my mood. Even the water turned a kind of unpleasant dark metallic color.<\/p>\r\n