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A Nudge of Climate Change



Mari and I visited friends and relatives in Tucson just a few days ago.  It was during their frigid winter month:  January, or course!  Seventy degrees.  Mari was too warm.

During last night, I awoke thinking that she and I have to find a middle ground; perhaps Nebraska.  I was cold.  The reason I was cold, I discovered when I got up, was that our boiler--the contraption that heats water for our faucets and for room heating--was not working.  It was 54 degrees in the house.  Fortunately, we are in the midst of a heat wave:  it is 15 F. above, not below, zero, as it was a day or two ago. 

The view above is out the window over where I sit and type this.  Penguins are flolicking in the neighbors yard.  Whoops!  I think they ducked down behind the broken igloo! 

We have gas space heaters in both garages, up and down, so I turned them on, and put fans in the doors to the living quarters.  I fired up the wood stove in the living room.  We are gaining on the dark side of global warming.  It is already up over sixty degrees F.  What good luck this did not happen last week, while we were out of town!  The repair man will be here sometime today, maybe, the scheduler said. 

The dark side of global warming is that the almost-unknown effects of glacial melting, and all of that, does not mean that it gets warmer everywhere.  It messes up all the weather patterns.  Ice melts, ocean currents change temperature and pathways, some dry spots broil, others get wet, and Mari gets hot in Tucson, and I get cold in Minneapolis. 

We had a water pipe burst last winter, resulting in an extensive repair of our lower floor.  We do not need that, again!  I would move to Florida, which I know almost nothing about, but about which I have a mass of negative opinions, and where tropical fish are freezing to death, or cooling to death, and where Tea Baggers are heating up.  You see, that is the mixed result of global warming, or global climate change.  Old fish heads, like me, get cold, and those engaged in Tea Bagging heat up.  Personally, I prefer getting cold, but that is just a political opinion, probably. 

Anyway, living in the cold did not damage Sarah Palin, appreciably.  She is just as perky and intelligent as she always has been.  I find long-term hope for us all in that simple-minded fact. 

I don't want the whole globe to warm, but just a little nudge toward a temperate climate inside the house would be nice. 

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