Three eggs, well done.

So... The eggs are done. After two months of hopeful waiting (yeah, we know that it shouldn't take that long) we finally gave up on the bird nest full of eggs hanging on our front door. We hadn't seen momma bird in weeks, and now that we're into the Arizona summer, the front door gets a few hours of pretty intense direct sunlight each evening. Reluctantly, we decided to take down the wreath.

The eggs were almost entirely weightless, and looked pretty sunbleached. We haven't broken them, but my guess is that there's a few grams of dehydrated (just add water?) egg inside each of them at this point. Too bad.

How is it possible that the water is 90 degrees, the air is 100 degrees, and I'm cold when I get out of the pool?

A friend (and fellow Arizona resident) recently asked this question in his Facebook status, so after confirming that the question was non-rhetorical, I decided to put together a response. Here goes. :-)

So... Starting with the obscure administrivia... Heating one gram of water one degree expends one calorie of energy. (Yes, those kind of calories.) Not too hard, right?

Making water change phase (solid to liquid or liquid to gas) expends a *lot* more energy -- 540 calories per gram for vaporization, specifically.

The super-dry (read: really, really non-saturated) Arizona air induces the water to start the evaporation process -- kinda like a dry sponge sucking up water.

In order to break away from the neighboring water molecules and "go gaseous" the evaporating water pulls quite a bit of heat from its surroundings. (...warm air, the pool deck, the sun's rays, etc.) If the water happens to be on your body, then it will pull heat from your body in order to evaporate, making you (and the air around you) feel cold.

A breeze accelerates this evaporation process by continuously providing you with new, dry, warm air -- kinda like that mysterious revolving cloth towel in dodgy gas station bathrooms. Combine shade (read: no direct energy contribution from the sun's rays) and a little breeze and as my daughters learned at their summer swim meets, the evaporating water can pull a LOT of heat from your skin and make you very cold -- even during the heat of the day.

This same mechanism is what your body is trying to use when you sweat. When your body gets hot, it will leak a little bit of water out through your pores in the hopes that it will evaporate and cool your skin. In the spots where your skin is more exposed, this works pretty well. In spots that are less exposed to the air (armpits, etc.) the water tends to accumulate a bit. :-)

Goose bumps are your body's attempt to minimize the breeze effect. Your hair follicles tighten up and stand all of your little hairs on end in an attempt to capture a layer of stationary air next to your skin. (Same principle as a wet suit, for you surfers out there.) When you see wintry animals fluffing up their fur or feathers, they're doing the same thing.

This tendency for water to pull energy from its surroundings when evaporating is also the reason why swamp coolers work well in the desert (and why they are much less efficient in humid places where the pre-saturated air is less actively encouraging more evaporation.)

...and so when you're in one of those humid places like Florida or Louisiana or central Illinois (where I grew up), the air can be almost completely saturated with water already (read: 90+% humidity) that your sweat just doesn't evaporate very much. There, you get out of the 90 degree water in the 100 degree air and the water sitting on your 98.6 degree body just warms up a bit (without evaporating.)

...and that's also why we had to immediately throw our wet bathtowels in the dryer at my grandparents' house in Eastern Tennessee. If you just hang them up, they water in them doesn't just evaporate (and the towels mildew before the next morning. Eeew.)

...and you just get wetter and wetter until you finally wise up and move to Arizona. ;-)

What's that up there?

Many of you will be somewhat familiar with this decoration we've had for many years. Tonight, as my brothers and I came back to my house and were walking through the front door (where this decoration is presently hanging) I noticed something a bit strange out of the corner of my eye and paused to look a little closer at this decoration. Just above the red hearts, between the "cheeks" of the hearts, was a wad of green grass.

...or maybe the beginnings of a bird nest?

I grabbed the nearest kid (my eight-year-old second daughter, I think) and lifted her up high enough to look down inside the wad of grass. Her reply?

"Whoa. There's eggs in there."

Thinking that she might just be playing with me, I grabbed my eleven-year-old oldest daughter and lifted her up for a peek.

"Cool. There are three of them."

Thinking that daughter #1 might just be playing along with daughter #2's reaction, I lifted up my two-year-old daughter #3 (who hasn't yet figured out how to play tricks on her gullible father) and asked, "What do you see?"

"Eggs."

By now, my sister-in-law had already gotten the camera out and brought it over. I help it up high, pointed it back down at the nest, and took a picture. Looking at the LCD screen afterwards, sure enough, there were three little blue eggs in there.

...and they're hanging on the front door of our house.

Jeff Lindsay's post this morning (about the ducks that build nests near his house) drew some fun parallels with the responsibility of human parents to make good choices regarding where and how to raise our children. Thanks, Jeff!

We've seen momma bird come and go (usually go) a few times since we noticed the nest, so as far as we know, everybody is still in business. I'll post again as events unfold. :-)

Here we go!

Okay, okay, okay... I'm finally giving in and starting a blog.

A warning up front... The contents here at Normally Eclectic are gonna vary wildly. I'm planning *NOT* to be a frequent poster. Almost everything here will be a commentary on or response to worthwhile things I find elsewhere (though there will be exceptions.) We'll see how this ends up working.

I don't expect huge traffic. I don't expect that many folks will care what I have to say. A few of you will, and I try to help where I can. If you stop in from time to time and find that I'm not completely wasting your time, then we'll both be happy. Enjoy! :-)