Flat-Earthers

Day 119 (caught up - backdated posts below): If I had a dollar for every person who has said to me, "I think the scientists are wrong about global warming. Look how much more snow we had last year," I could retire quite happily and live off the interest, so I'm going to give a very simplified explanation for those of you who are being deceived by your eyes. If you don't "get it" after this, I wash my hands of you.

There is a lot of water on this little blue marble we call home. It's in oceans and lakes and rivers, and it's also in less obvious places like glaciers and ice fields. When the weather is warm and dry, a portion of this surface water evaporates and is held in the atmosphere. The higher the temperature goes and the drier it gets, the evaporation rate increases. When temperatures cool again, that moisure condenses and falls back to Earth as rain or snow. This can and does occur regionally as a perfectly normal process. When it occurs on a global scale, we see more record events and "super-storms." That is what is occurring at the present time: a deviation out of the range of normal cycles. Our glaciers and ice fields are diminishing, and sea level is rising as the water which was once stockpiled as ice is carried aloft and re-deposited in liquid form.

My tolerance for willful ignorance and the "flat-earth mentality" of certain sectors of our population is at an all-time low presently. Even if you choose not to "believe" in global warming (man-caused or natural), wouldn't it be better to err on the side of caution and look at what we can do about it instead of greasing the skids?

Bizarro World

Day 103: I love surrealism...unless, of course, I happen to be living it, which at the moment I most certainly feel like I am. Twilight-Zone events are taking place all around me, I've reached the Outer Limits and am tiptoeing at the edge of the abyss. I'm awake nights and asleep days. I've gone through half a dozen light bulbs in the space of 48 hours, a phenomenon which has proven out time and again over the years as being directly related to my mood. I feel as if the planets have all gone retrograde, spinning contrary to their normal course around the sun; as if I had been transported to Bizarro World where everything is backwards or upside-down.

Should it have surprised me to find a chicken-legged Humpty Dumpty on a ledge above the projector screen in the conference room yesterday? All things considered, perhaps not, but at least it made me laugh.

Now This Is An Icicle

Day 83: Now THIS is worthy of the name "icicle," and no, you don't want to know what I did to get this shot, maybe doubly so because I had just been in a safety meeting in the conference room outside which it was hanging. No, it didn't extend to the ground. It terminated at the porch roof where its diameter wasn't much smaller than at this point. I had nothing handy to give a sense of scale other than some portion of my anatomy and I needed one hand to operate the camera and the other for stability. If you view the webcam at Longmire, you'll be able to tell that I was just a few windowpanes to the north. We only keep the icicles from obstructing the view directly in front of the webcam. More snow coming this week!