Skip to main content

BLIZZARD ENVELOPS TUCSON! TIRE COMPANIES REPORT NOT A SINGLE SNOW TIRE IN STOCK!


A blizzard, consisting of several snowflakes of perceptible dimension, and wind drifting eastward toward Tucumcari and Bermuda, is driving through Tucson at this hour.  Looking toward Pusch Ridge from a vantage point in our kitchen--as the photo shows--one can see that not a single automobile can be seen, and even the plants that were not able to seek shelter before the storm hit are at a complete standstill.

Grandparents have been warned not to allow their grandsons out into the streets, unsupervised, lest the Pima County Dirt Grading and Pothole Supervision Crew find their last remaining, horse-drawn grader, and come trotting down the street, unable to control their unfamiliar equipment.

Two crews from the ski run up at the top of Mount Lemon, at the top of the Catalina Mountains on the northeast side of the City, have been dispatched to the Valley floor to sweep up as much snow as they can manage, and bring it back to the ski run.  A bulletin has gone out to all fourteen skiers in the County to find their ski wax and long pants.  

On a much more personal note, Mari and I are not entirely depressed by this weather development.  For many years, we lived in Decorah, Iowa, and just this week we learned that an asteroid crater lies directly beneath that small town in northeast Iowa, from a direct hit about 470 million years ago.  We feel lucky to have missed that, and are confident we can deal with this snow, however brutal it turns out to be.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...