Brutal Weather Everywhere You Look

Dan and Ellie, toward the end of their medical residencies in Portland, Oregon, began to notice that several years of Portland weather had caused moss to grow on their north sides, so they came to Tucson for a couple of days of dehydration. It was inevitable that we would have our first two brutally cold days of autumn (or is it winter?). It took all day for the temperature to creep up to 70 degrees F.

We went to the Desert Museum, and as we should have known, the cacti were huddled up together, and the mountain lions were hiding inside, nursing their arthritis. The javelinas were out, but even they bulldozed themselves into a heap to conserve heat. The desert fox could be seen through an indoor window, snuggled up to an electric blanket.

Only the prairie dogs seemed unfazed by the Ice Age. They sat on their haunches, as serene as a bishop holding four aces.

Our first winter vegetable garden, on the south side of the house, where I had stirred up every piece of pollen accumulated there over the decades, causing me to howl with sinus irritation, survived the vicious dark side of climate change, and the carrots are staring to show. (I do not know much about gardening, so I just planted whatever seedlings of seeds that promised to be something I would eat, if all goes well.

The Old Timers baseball team does not start its games now until 10:00, to allow the sun to dry out the infield, not from rain, but from the sprinkler system.

I read that the Twin Cities had several unusual tornadoes yesterday, not too powerful, but stall somewhat of a surprise in November, in Minnesota. Ah, well, we all have to share in the suffering. Here, too, we had to turn the heat pumps from air conditioning to heating.

(Don't you just hate these kind of weather reports?)

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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