Global Warming Threatens washoevalley.org?
All my indoor projects/hobbies suffer when spring comes around. Indoor activities take a backseat to going outside and enjoying the warm air and sun. Plus, I get reminded of all the projects/hobbies waiting out there!
My brother-in-law from Tucson called and said the real estate market is tanking there. Hmmm, maybe the mild winters we’ve been having have been prompting many northerners to forgo the “snowbird trip” in the winter. Last winter, I swore when I got tired of the cold here around about February, we would go south for awhile, at least to Death Valley for a couple of days. But this year I didn’t even think about it.
The New York Times had an article the other day on how Arizona is losing its “sky islands”, mountaintop areas that used to be a higher, damper and much cooler climate zone from the heat of the valleys. Tucson residents used to explain away living in a furnace by saying they could escape to Mt. Lemmon and enjoy the alpine air. Now, after two devestating wildfires and marginal snows, the mountain seems a tad parched, like it did last spring when we visited.
All this makes our own ridgetops, the Virginia Range to the east and the Carson Range to the west, even more precious. We should all be extra careful about wildfires from now on.
Of Apples and Snobbery
Ha! One thing I’ve discovered since getting the mac is that its a computer, with an operating system, file system, memory, etc. In other words, it can have problems like the PC, only some are different. So, most of the Apple hype is just plain old snobbery. Snobbery is when you think something A is better than something B and you think you are superior for using something A. I hate snobbery in all categories.
We got a Coleman canoe once when they first came out and they are a garish orange/red plastic material. Very practical for dragging over rocks, etc. We decided to check out the local canoe club and when we pulled up we were put off by the disapproving looks form the “cool canoers” with the $1000+ canoes. That was my first experience with sports snobs. Same thing years later when a friend convinced us to go on a mountain bike ride despite our suspicians. We warned him we just liked gradual slopes and would probably stop to admire the views and identify wildflowers. Sure enough, when we got to the house to meet with his friends, they were literaly rebuilding theeir bikes in the living room preparing for the ride. One of the riders looked at my wifes Trek off-the-shelf bike and commented sympathetically, “Yes, that’s a nice bike”. We took one look at each other and politely said, “See ya later, have a nice ride”.
With me, the point is to have have fun, or at least enjoy what you are doing. Snobbery, which is a stepchild of a competitive nature, doesn’t enter into it. It acutally makes people look a little silly when they rant about how far superior Apple computers are to PC’s when at the same time they are filling online discussion groups with question and answers about crashes, glitches and arcane commands. Granted, a lot of my cynicism comes from being new to the Mac and we’ll see how I feel in a couple (?) of years when it is second nature.
