That’s the sun, our sun, for those of you reading this on other worlds — though I’ve seen no evidence of intra- or extra-galactic IP addresses in my site log. Okay, and technically it’s a representation of our sun, one that looks more like a sunflower…
… which I assume is how the plant got its name. I’m not sure I could conceive a better pictorial representation of the sun. Who could blame whoever came up with this one, a yellow hot core encircled by flare and fire, being it was based, I assume, on just a few very short peeks at the sun. This because mothers forever have warned their sons never to look into the eyes of the sun, cautioning us that doing so would lead, like certain other boyhood “activities”, to blindness.
For the record it didn’t, and I don’t mean looking into the sun.
There’s a funny saying up here that I like to haul out while seated at a downtown bar filled with summer tourists, when one of them asks me,
Q: “Oh, so you live here, wow. I hear it’s cloudy a lot?”
A: “An Alaskan woke one spring day, looked into the sky and saw a very bright light, and he knew, from books he had read, that must be the sun.”
We do hear this from time to time: “You live here?” Uttered by some visitors we interpret this as envy, by others, sympathy. For still others it may merely imply wonder, they wonder what it might be like to live and work here. They are genuinely curious. These are the people I’m most likely to want to continue talking with. The trophy tourists, by contrast, the ones who’ll be deplaning by the thousands at our airport in a couple weeks, preloaded with their twenty insipid questions — “How dark does it get; How do you sleep in summer; Where’s Mt. McKinley; etc. etc.” — the ones who come here for a whirlwind week for no other reason but so that they can put push another pin into the national map hanging in their basement back home — Illinois or wherever — not so much. I am suspicious these are the same people who go to oval track car races just to see the crashes.
I wondered today: on average how many days of sun a year are there in Anchorage? One site boasting the banner “Research News and Scientific Facts,” claimed we get 61 sunny days (65 partly sunny). Taken together, roughly a third of the year. That’s not terrible, until you consider that half the year here is practically winter, and a sunny day during winter, while by no means unappreciated, can feel like a waste of a cloudless day because 1) the sun has less punch in the winter, and 2) does little to increase the ambient air temperature. Assuming these 126 sunny to partly sunny days were evenly distributed throughout the year (and they aren’t — it seems to me we have more cloudless days in winter), that means about 60 of our 180 non-winter days are sunny to partly sunny, about 1/3.
Based on over twenty years of living in Anchorage that seems high. But everyday we get one I am pleased as punch. (By the way, what does it mean to be Pleased as Punch?).
Anyway, yesterday was once such day, and together Otis I pedaled like there was no tomorrow.
Because you don’t know for sure that there will be.
“(By the way, what does it mean to be Pleased as Punch?).”
Since you piqued my curiosity, here’s one explanation, though I’m partial to this short explanation, which also references Punch.
The phrase pleased as punch apparently refers to his unfailing triumph over enemies.