Dawn and Dusk

I love Dawn and Dusk, they are wonderful times of the day filled with strange and haunting colors and the anticipation of change.

Growing up in a town nestled in a wide valley between the Wasatch and Wellsville mountains, a vividly recall crisp autumn mornings walking to the school bus stop when the sun was not yet risen enough to warm the valley but had lit the clouds over the western mountains into brilliant shades of white, tangerine, auburn and orange in a pale azure sky.  Usually a bit of extra poignancy there because our schools colors were white, blue, and orange.

I also remember after Mount Saint Helen and the Yellowstone fire the awesome brilliance of the sunsets through the particulate laden skies.  Sunsets I’ve only seen rivaled when I lived in outside Phoenix Arizona and the late summer evening ‘monsoon’ winds would rush over the desert, wet clouds behind a huge baboob (the initial front wall of a dust storm) racing across the desert towards you as it’s lit into glorious colors by the setting sun.    

I was driving up I-15 along the Wasatch mountains today, after work in the late afternoon.  The mountains were gray except where they were capped with snow.  The snow was brilliant white in direct sun light and a greyish blue in the shadows.  The sky was so clean after the recent wind storms, lite blue but beginning to darken into the evening.  Clouds were scattered everywhere, also white in the sun but greyish in the shadowed side away from the sun.

Up close everything was so distinct.  The textures of the mountain and the clouds so vivid in the unusually clean air.  But further north, the further away you looked, the distance made it harder it distinguish and soon the mind began to misinterpret what it was seeing…

Grey mountains under white and blue/grey snow, under white and grey clouds in a blue/grey sky soon began to mix and the mind insisted that higher clouds, still brightly white in the setting sun, hovered over the mountains.  But these mountains with their white tops and grey bottoms where actually lower clouds, their undersides in shadow.  These ‘mountains’ confusingly floated above more clouds (actually  snow still in the sunlight) floating in the blue sky (the snow low enough to no longer be in the setting sunlight).

It was beautiful and confusing all mixed together.

Is this just real life? Is this just fantasy?

Sometimes the world just doesn’t seem to make sense to me.  Today I had one of those moments.  Leaving work today I saw a series of actions that I just could not find a rationalization for…  It only lasted for about four minutes… the time it took me to walk from the building to my car so maybe there was some context before or after that I missed, but from what I observed I just don't know what was going on.

Observed: Very large industrial lawn mower (about twice the size of a golf cart) mowing one of the lawns around the building VERY VERY fast.

Thoughts: 1) even a mower that large could not be doing a very good job going that fast.  2) Why are they mowing?  It’s the end of November, the grass is dormant for the winter and was mowed just a couple of weeks ago.

Observed: Mower finishes the strip of grass and moves into the parking lot, increases speed to probably 20 miles an hour and mows the aisles in the parking lot.  Not all of them, just three of about twelve.

Thoughts: 1) Why is he mowing the parking lot?  2) That is really an unsafe speed to be tearing around a parking lot, especially with meter long blades whirling at hundreds of revolutions a minute under you.  3) Maybe he can’t remember where he parked, LOL. 4) Maybe he’s treating the asphalt with something… no, he came right off the grass without stopping and there’s no tanks on that monster to spray chemicals.   4) Why is he mowing the parking lot (because at this point it was obvious by his pattern that was what he was doing and, well, it was so inexplicable to me it needed to be asked twice).

Observed: After mowing about a fourth of the parking lot he drove up on the sidewalk to get to another strip of grass, but remember how big this mower is, it wouldn’t fit through the anti-vehicle barriers (waist high metal poles imbedded into the concrete).  This didn’t stop him from trying, although he did slow down to just a couple of miles per hour before bouncing once, twice, thrice, and a final fourth time off the barriers trying to get through them.  The first time he hit them he barely managed to stay on the mower.

Thoughts: 1) This guy is drunk, stoned, stupid, and/or crazy.  2) I wonder what would happen if he had been thrown off the mower.  3) RRRRrrrrrrrr, chuck, Ahhhhhh!, helppppp gurgle chuck chuck RRRRRRrrrrr (series of mental images with sound effects of a riderless rider mower comically chasing people down in the parking lot.  4) Man, whats wrong with me... I shouldn't be finding humor in a visualization like that.

Observed: Guy finally figures out that something five feet wide will not fit through a four foot  opening, backs up, and guns it down the parking lot to another section of lawn not guarded by barriers and commences to mow that area.  Not a single person of the half dozen walking to the parking lot with me appears to find anything at all unusual about what is going on.

Thoughts: 1) What is he doing?  Why is he doing it?  Why is the State paying him to do it?  2) Am I the only person that is seeing this?  3) Life makes no sense to me… I want to go home.  4) Maybe I’ll blog about it to see if anyone else can explain this strange aspect of reality to me.


Observed: Date of last blog post

Thoughts: Wow!  I have not posted in this blog thing for a long time.

Lotteries, time travel, and other trivialities

What would you do if you won the lottery... and

What would you do if you could do it all again

So I think that all of us have, at one point or another, imagined what it would be like if we could go back and do it all over again.  If you suddenly found yourself once again a young child but with all of your adult memories.  Girls you would have dated (or would have definitely NOT dated), jobs you would never have taken, opportunities that you would make sure not to loose. It’s definitely fun to consider but also not likely to ever happen.  But one of my thoughts has always been: “well its fun to think about but if you only had a couple of seconds to react before it happened what would you do?  What would you try to take with you?”

One of the benefits from going back in time would probably be financial: knowing what to invest in when.  The weakness, it seems, comes from having a funds to start with when you arrive.  In most cases it takes money to make money.  Yes, you’ll know major events such as stock market crashes, who wins major sporting events, invest in Apple, and the like; all of which provide you opportunities to make money... if you have money to start with. 

Water Snobbery

Hi, I'm James and I'm a Water Snob.

It all started when I was very young.  I grew up in a small city high in the mountains... a place with wonderful water.  My favorite drink in my youth was tap water, so clean and refreshing, I could drink glass after glass after glass of the stuff.

And then I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.  When I got off the plane and it was BAKING hot.  It was midsummer and the daily temperatures averaged in the 110s and 120s (that's 40-50 degrees for my huge audience of non-American readers).  One immediate result of the heat was that I REALLY needed something to drink.

Ah... a kitchen faucet!  Long the trusty source of revitalizing sustanance.  I grabbed a glass, twisted a nob and... what is that smell?  Yep, that's right, for the split second before the alleged water actually came out of the tap I could already smell it.  Water definitely should not be smellable.  For the first several months I lived in Arizona I lived almost entirely on soda pop, until a roommate who was doing the same thing came back from the dentist with strict orders to stop or all your teeth will all fall out.  Fortunately I was blessed with excellent preventive dental care in my youth so my teeth were fine... but the point was taken.  For the next several years I lived on a mixture of bottled water, or tap water mixed with drink mixes or caps of lemon juice to mask the smell and taste.

Later I ended up in our Nation's Capital (again, for my foreign readers, Washington, DC).  The tap water was a vast improvement to watery sludge of Phoenix but still not what I'd call fit for human consumption.  More soda, drink mixes, and bottled water.

Now I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah... which you would think, since its only 80 miles from where I grew up, would have wonderful water.  After all SLC tap water is so wonderful water that the Salt Lake County Mayor decided to ban bottled water in government offices (not people bringing personal bottles of water, just the big office water coolers) to celebrate our awesome waterness.

So SLC water is amazing right?   Nope.  Better than DC but it still tastes like your drinking water from a swimming pool which always makes me wonder about how many people have peed in this pool before it got to my tap. 

Even more wonderful, SLC water has something in it... I think it's the high mineral content, that makes my tummy very unhappy.  Even if I run it through Brita filters it still gives me a tummy ache to drink it.  After drinking a liter of it, it feels like my stomach has curled itself up into a fetal position while trying to hide under its neighbor the liver while quietly whimpering to itself in pain.   

I don't drink a lot of water anymore.  I miss the aqua of my youth.