ASSORTED MEANDERINGS

A fairly quiet weekend. Actually compared to some of the blogs I follow, we lead a very quiet life. Get up, eat breakfast, drive to work, drive home, and spend the hours in between in my little cubicle home away from home. Usually the most exciting thing that happens to me is dealing with some of my fellow commuters. Some of these guys are crazy. Hug mom, torment the cats, eat dinner, take a shower, read a little, knit a little, surf a little, go to bed and start over the next day.

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Somebody flipped the weather switch and it’s been relatively cool and damp since the end of September. Just about the time you start to expect reasonably good weather for most of October it decides to be different just to keep us guessing. Actually this summer has been weird anyway. I hope it doesn’t mean we’re going to have a cooler than usual winter. Although folks living in the Midwest and New England would probably argue that what passes for winter in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Willamette Valley is just a really cool fall. There’s maybe six weeks from mid December to the end of January when there’s any real risk of severe cold or a lot of snow and the last ten years or so there’s been maybe one really bad winter storm that affected everything from Seattle to Springfield.

 

The upshot is that the trees start to leaf out fairly early and they turn color in pretty much the order they leaf out. We get really pretty autumn color, but not all at once. I see some really pretty ornamentals by the streets that are a fantastic red or orange right next to maples or poplars that are still nice and green. And it seems like when the colors hit their height we have a windy rainstorm and everything gets blown down anyway.

 

Ordered the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth and I’m looking forward to getting it. I get a kick out of reading the one star reviews of any film. Most of them love to label global warming as pseudo science. Some cite prehistoric data that the planet was warmer, much warmer, once upon a time. Yeah it was. Back when the continents were in different positions, the Arctic Ocean wasn’t nearly land locked, Antarctica wasn’t sitting on top of the South Pole, dinosaurs were still trundling around and the plants were much different. Flowers, grasses and deciduous trees are all post dino adaptations.

 

One argument I really love is that since ice is floating on the oceans, melting the ice won’t raise sea levels. Yo, that would work if most of the ice in question wasn’t on land. Even if sea levels didn’t rise, most of the water on this planet is sea water. And most of the fresh water is frozen. It isn’t going to do us much good flowing into the oceans. And most of our food crops and domestic animals were developed in the last eleven thousand years under a specific type of climate. I just love writers who criticize a lack of critical thinking while showing absolutely none themselves. Fall weather to climate change. Never quite sure where I’m going to end up when I start.

 

Have a couple of good books going. More about that later, I hope. I start something contemporary and keep putting it them aside because the answers seem to lie in earlier history. Then I start that and end up going further back. It’s like trying to untangle a skein of yarn that has a big knot in it without resorting to Alexander’s solution to the Gordian knot. (He took his sword and cut right through the middle, tempting but you can’t do to people what you can do to a ball of string.)

 

Anyway, it’s Sunday evening, and it’s quiet and I have to go back to work tomorrow. The weekend seems to go by awfully fast lately.