Well I had quite an uneventful day today. So uneventful that I can’t think of a single thing to put here. I went and read a few blogs and some news looking for something that would force me to comment, again nothing. So it seems I am reduced to talking about the weather, and I am not sure just how much one can comment on that.
Strange thing the weather, especially in the last few years. The first eight years that I lived in Arizona you could pretty much go without a calendar and just step outside to figure out what day of the year it was. The last few years, though, it has all started to get a bit screwy, I think that is a direct result of “Professor Chaos” and his aerosal can attacks on the planet, or not. The last two years or so, we have not really had the typical monsoon season that we usually do. There has been the requisite six or eight weeks of 100+ heat and high humidity, but it didn’t really yield any precipitation, at least not in an amount anywhere near the previous eight years.
Each year my wife and I go to Las Vegas on vacation. That requires a drive across the Hoover Dam, which is just an amazing thing to behold, you really should visit it if you never have, just to marvel at how something that massive in scale could have been made by human hands. At any rate, the water level in lake Mead (that’s the lake that the dam created, and I think the largest man made lake on the planet.), is obviously going down each year. The first couple of years that we drove over the dam the water was up at a certain level, but each of the last two years you could look at the large towers out in the lake and see calcium deposits on them where the normal water level is. And each of the last two years that level has been at least a couple of feet lower. I am not sure exactly how much water that would actually be, the lake is 229 square miles and holds about 9 trillion gallons of water (I googled that up, and as such found that there is a place called Owens Falls in Uganda that is the largest man made lake on the planet and is about 5 times larger than Lake Mead). During that search, I found some information about ‘acre feet’ of water. If I had the inclination, I could determine how much water had been lost by finding out how many acres there are in a square mile, multiplying that by 229 square miles, then multiplying that by how many feet the water level has receeded in the last couple of years, then multiplying that by 326,000(that is one acre foot of water). Since my calculator only has eight digits on the display I am not even going to try, if you want to go ahead, assume that the lake has dropped about four feet in the last two years, send me the answer to that question BTW as it is something that I am dying to know. Also, there will be a test on Thursday.
Oh yeah, the weather. As I wrote about previously, the weather here had been unseasonably warm, almost breaking 100 degrees a few days in March. Just as I was beginning to think that we were heading for summer, the weather changed, today we barely made it to 70. On top of that it has been cloudy and rainy all day, not like the type of rain that we normally get here, where it will dump a half an inch of rain in twenty minutes, then be back to clear skies, just a steady drizzle all day. The type of rain that makes Seattle Washington have the nations highest suicide rate. In short, the type of weather that I love.
This is exactly the type of weather that I left behind when I moved away from Oregon ten years ago. The weather up there is what I think I miss the most. I always try to tell myself that the weather down here is better, but when it comes right down to it, I am happiest on days like this, and there are very few of them down here. I think that it is kind of bred into you to like the weather where you are born, unless you happen to be born in Siberia or the middle of the Gobi desert. I don’t mean that as a steadfast rule that if you were born in one place you could never live anywhere else, I really think that it is more about the fact that when you happen to be somewhere else you seem to forget the down side to the weather where you used to live.
I certainly don’t miss being snowed in half the winter. We could actually go out and drive to town, but it took a hell of a long time. Try driving twenty miles, on curvy roads, in fourteen inches of snow with chains on your tires sometime, you don’t really ever make it to highway speeds, unless you are quite suicidal. At the same time if I were to move away from here, I certainly wouldn’t miss the days where we have 90percent humidity on 100 plus degree days, though I would likely miss the very mild winters.
There is one thing about the weather that is constant, and that is that when it is cold you can always add another layer of clothing, or put on a jacket, or gloves. When it is hot, you can only get so naked, and after that you are just miserable if you are outside. I certainly like the cold a lot better than the heat, but it is easy to say that as I sit here with my doors open and a room temperature of just about seventy. I don’t remember a single day in Oregon where I simply left my door open at eight o’clock at night. Except when my dog ran away, but that is a different story.
You may be asking yourself why I left the wonderful temperature in Oregon, well I will tell the story here;
In November of 1994 several things happened in quite rapid succession, that led to numerous reasons why I no longer wanted to be there at that time. 1st) The girl that I was supposed to marry broke up with me (which is a good thing, since had it never happened I would never have moved down here and met my wife, well she wasn’t my wife when I met her, but…you know what I mean). 2nd) I lost my job at the Texaco station because I bought beer there while I was underage. 3rd) As a result of that, I could no longer afford to live in the uninsulated, leaky-roofed garage that I was paying 50 bucks a week for. 4th) I had previously gotten a DUI and needed to go to a counseling class that required payment, money that I did not have. 5th) I was in a hell of a lot of debt, I mean like 20,000 dollars of debt due to checks that were written on a joint banking account before I turned 18 (I made good on the debt once I moved here, thank you). 6th) I just knew that if I didn’t get out of that situation I was going to end up in prison. The friends that I had were all into drugs, the relatives that were nearby were even more into drugs, and though I smoked pot a few times I really didn’t want to end up like some of my other relatives. The ones who have been in and out of jails and prisons their entire lives.
My mother lived here in Arizona at the time, and helped me in getting a bus ticket to get down here. I was twenty years old when I moved here, and literally the only posessions that I had when I got here were what fit in a single suitcase. Unfortunately I was so young that most of the posessions that I actually brought with me were cassette tapes. I actually had to buy clothes at a thrift store a few days after I arrived here so that I would have enough clean clothes to wear to work six days a week.
I actually got a job only nine days after I got here, and am still working there. I am glad that the past is just that, the past. I really believe that it is a wonder that I am doing as well as I am, what after having basically killed my father(I updated that page a bit, BTW), being in trouble with the law( there were other issues which I will not address here), and losing literally everything. Sometimes I really wonder how I have made it through it all, but most times I just look around and thank my lucky stars that I didn’t end up in a little pine box under the dirt somewhere in Oregon.