Category: California
End of 2018 (Recalling the Lab)
Professionally, 2018 was a good year: my sabbatical work was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. That came from a long time writing and a long time in this lab.
Berkeley Lab’s Frei Group was kind enough to share their space with me, and I could not have done that work without this high vacuum line. I’ve always loved the way understanding the components of a system can take a complicated image like this one and break it into understandable parts. This image, in particular, gets less odd after the realization that this is two lines, mounted back-to-back, in the same Unistrut frame.
Dirigible
Golden Gate Golden Hour
Red Stairs Over the Laundry Room
Capturing pictures of the everyday and mundane details of living in a place as odd as Berkeley’s Normandy Village means that I can look back to the little details. This maroon fire escape served as the back door to our apartment, but also easy access to the shared laundry room—and thus a route I frequently traversed, trying to find a time when the machines were free.
Garage of Berkeley
Down the tiny alleys, side streets, and driveways of Berkeley are all kinds of odd old garages. My favorite details of these structures usually come down to scale; the driveway tracks and garage measurements were clearly built to be just large enough for the cars of the period. As American vehicles have grown larger, they now appear comically mismatched with anything but a vintage car in the scene.
Pastel Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge is so often depicted either in strong primary colors or in classic black and white that a hazy, pastel-hued summer version is a mellow contrast.
Street Truck
For this vintage Ford pickup to survive so long in the northeast, it would have to have been a carefully-tended-to garage-kept apple of someone’s eye. Rust is too cruel a monster otherwise. On the streets of Berkeley, by comparison, older vehicles seem to still be around simply because there has been no reason for them to ever stop being around. Though I suspect this is indeed a well-loved truck, nothing about its existence so formally requires that as the equivalent vehicle would in my new neck of the woods.
Secret Weapons
Walking through the side streets of Berkeley, all kinds of delightful sports cars are secreted away in the driveways of wood-shingled homes. This BMW 2002 looks like it’d be a hoot to drive.
This Alfa Romeo Spyder also looks (and this is a technical term) “the business.”
Sky-Colored Foundry
The somewhat-reflective panels on the planar faces of Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry make the pallet for the Bay Area’s winter colors.
Sabbatical 2017
I finally finished processing the photographs of the transcontinental drive, transient spectroscopy, and Transamerica pyramid that made up my 2017 sabbatical from St. Lawrence University to Berkeley Lab for solar energy research. Check out my favorites, in handy chronological order, by clicking on the image of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge below:
Lights of Building 66
On America’s birthday, the Department of Energy’s National Lab system feels like quite a gift. The amount of innovation and discovery coming from the dramatic-yet-humble concrete structures is another reason to celebrate.
Exiting the BART
The Downtown Berkeley BART stop was about to be closed for renovation when I last visited Berkeley. Have those changes been brought to fruition? Does that mean the end of the weathered bright entrances and weirdly sharp stairs? I know a quick search could answer these questions, but for just a moment I’m embracing the mystery.
Bayglow
There’s a sunset balance point when the intensity of San Francisco’s city lights precisely match the intensity of the light remaining in the sky. When those photons are in equal proportion, even a busy city can look oddly peaceful.
That Was Home
Arriving at the one-year anniversary of the end of my sabbatical time in Berkeley, I’ve also reached the end of processing pictures that I took while I was there—though many more will be posted in the future. Our apartment was on the second flood of this build, where the screen of the same laptop on which I’m currently typing lights up the bottom-right corner of the window and the narrow slit of dark windows were over the kitchen sink where I’d cook dinner.
Decaseconds 