My goodness it has been a cold winter. A miserable winter. We have been in the Washington, DC area for twenty-four years this time and I can’t remember a winter this cold. I keep waiting for Al Gore to explain this phenomenon. I’m sure he can explain it. I’m also sure it is just part of the big picture. I’m just too damn cold to see it.
We stayed in the DC area after we retired because we had been here a long time and the winters really weren’t that bad. I would explain to people how the storms that hit the Midwest usually missed us. It had to do with the “ski board” effect of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was the only one exposing this position and I hoped I would be discovered and receive some kind of an award. There’s a lot of stupid people out there giving out awards. However, I think this winter has substantially reduced the chances of my theory catching on.
It was 15 degrees and we still had eight inches of snow on the ground and the bird feeders were almost empty (two were empty and the third was down to the nub). I gave that a lot of thought. I could fill the three bird feeders in about 12 minutes. So I wouldn’t be outside too long. I bundled up layer on top of layer and headed out to the shed where I keep the bird seed. Nikki loves the snow and was nipping at my heels (a now useless sheep dog skill). The shed had an 18-inch snow bank around the door. So back to the house for the shovel. Nip, nip, nip. Twelve minutes turned into a half an hour. I’ve decided in the future to firmly apply a 27 degree wind chill factor rule. To hell with the 12 minute crap.
So what do you do when you are retired and it’s too cold and snowy to go outside? Let’s see, you can make an idiot out of yourself on Facebook or you can watch TV. I got a Facebook account so I would know what the grandchildren were doing. Let’s just say it was a mixed bag. They don’t get on Facebook to communicate with ole Grandpa. And, do I really need to see You Tube stunts that didn’t make it?
Well a week ago I decided to drag out a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the castle at the Magic Kingdom. It’s a lovely picture done by Thomas Kinkade. We have been to Disney World a lot and this puzzle is a picture that Carole has taken over 50 times. Her pictures have a lot more definition than Kinkade’s painting. Except for part of the castle and the sky, all the pieces were a dark brown (including a lot of the lower castle) or dark green (water in front and the surrounding trees). After I did the border and the top of the castle, I spent a lot of time wondering why I started the stupid puzzle.
I am now going to set out some basic rules for doing a jigsaw puzzle. First, you need lots of room. The puzzle may be less than three feet by two feet, but you need twice that amount of space for laying out the pieces. You also need good light. I had to set up in the dining room to have enough space, but the lighting in that room wasn’t so great. So I’m sitting there with a flashlight looking at the pieces. After five minutes, the pieces started getting darker. The flashlight batteries were heading for the battery graveyard. New batteries and I was good to go, just looking stupid.
Once you get enough of the pieces placed, you can look for odd shapes and then try to locate the piece with that shape. I found a location with a very distinctive shape and looked through all of the pieces left with absolutely no luck. I looked again. Same result. And, of course, all the pieces left were some shade of gray. My conclusions was that there was a piece missing. That was crazy because I had broken the plastic seal on the bag with all the pieces tucked inside. That bag had been approved by Inspector # 4. He or she was not going to get away with this.
After you have spent twenty minutes looking for one piece, it’s time to move on to another part of the puzzle or quit for a few hours. I quit for the night mumbling about Inspector # 4.
The next day (my sixth), I was down to less than 75 pieces and I knew they would fall into place very soon. I had eight pieces assembled to each other, but not yet attached to the main puzzle. And quite frankly, I was running out of room. Something had to give. While trying to figure out where the eight-piece group fit, I noticed one piece attached to the wrong place. You’re right, it was the piece I had spent 20 minutes looking for the day before! I rapidly finished the puzzle.
While puzzles are a good way to spend a cold winter day, please remember that jigsaw puzzles, like chess, can become a form of sickness. Limit your playing time or find a support group. And, if by chance, you are Inspector # 4, I apologize.
Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.com
At least you kept your sanity and the Redskins are not playing so life is not all bad.
Del
HI Jack,
it was nice to see you and Carole again this evening, and to reconfirm that we can disagree politely and with good reasoning on all manner of issues in society. Since I had not been at your blog in some time, I decided to see if there was a particular topic already on which I might be able to give an alternate view. And voila, there it was right in your second blog: the quip about Al Gore. Presumably, you mean ‘global warming’, and you are correct: according to how I understand the theory, out frigid spell could well be due to a global-warming-related phenomenon.
The one I read was about an instability in the polar vortex, which, according to the lady who did the modeling of this phenomenon, becomes more severe as something connected with global warming increases. I wish I could remember what that was, but if you’re interested I’m sure you can find it with these keywords.
Besides this theoretical-modeling type suggestion (there is too little hard evidence, over many years, to be very sure) I can say that my family members in the Netherlands had an unusually warm winter, and that my colleague in Russia complained about the same thing: too warm. It so happens that Europe and Russia are on opposite sides of the pole from us, so that a shift in the cold polar air toward us is perfectly consistent with a shift of cold air away from Europe and Russia, and an inflow of warmer air there. Is that proof? Again, not, but it’s consistent with what one expects from global warming.
The proof of the pudding is, though, in a careful measurement of the average temperature over the whole earth. This, apparently, continues to increase when averaged over the years.And, the increase is at a much faster clip over the last few decades thanover the earlier decades.
This year’s weather, and all other evidence I have read, is clear evidence of global warming: the phenomenon is no longer in doubt. Neither is in doubt that increased energy use by people is the culprit.
That leaves a political problem is: what, if anything, do we do about it? and, who is ‘we’? just the civilized countries of the western world ( Japan?) Also Russia, China, and Brazil? Or only the European countries but not the US?
Do we want to try to reduce the use of fossil fuels? Those came from the time when the earth was really warm and the dinosaurs roamed the earth eating verns and each other: when all that material is back in the atmosphere, maybe it will become just as warm as it was back then.
Or, do we decide to do nothing, and let God sort it out? Or, something in between?
One can reasonably disagree about these political questions, but that global warming is real and occurring now is no longer in question. It’s well-established fact.