Truthfully I spent a lot of time today checking the changing weather forecast. It does seem like we will get a good bit of snow, but hopefully by the beginning of next week, the temperatures will be high enough to 
prevent a debacle like we just endured.
Very gray, cold and rainy all day. That kills whatever energy I have. Far too nasty to walk outside. And no ambition to do much inside, either.
Saw an interesting story today which I will follow up on. It seems Denmark has given up postal delivery of letters. Their National Postal service (or whatever it is called) will just deal with packages, due to the large drop in regular mail. If you want to send a letter, you will have to go to special stores (because they took away all the mailboxes). You will also have to pay an extra fee if you want to send a letter and have it picked up at your home. (Why do I have the feeling that somebody is going to make a bundle on this?)
That’s about it for today.
God bless everybody.
Patty
Dreary weather can really tear at the psyche. It’s not dreary here, the sky is bright blue with a few fluffy clouds blown by the wind. This isn’t gentle, friendly winds, but unrelenting, cold, chilling, insistent wind that makes a 50 degree day chilling to the bone. I spent about 20 minutes on a truncated bike ride, dressed up like a polar explorer, and came home chilled to the bone. For reasons I don’t fully understand, even without the wind, a sunny 60 degree F day in Arizona can feel chilly. A 30 degree F day can feel very cold and truly cold temperatures, which are rare, feel every bit as bad as the -30 F temps I have experienced in the midwest. The coldest I’ve ever seen here is 4 degrees F, and it was pretty brutal. Something about the air in Arizona just saps the heat from your body.
Weather has profound effects on the human body. Some folks are more sensitive to it than others.
Exactly. The roiling clouds of the Midwest can literally make me feel ill. Hence, I’ve spent most of my life in the west.
I was only “out West” for a couple of weeks and I did really like it. The landscape is so HUGE out there.
The first time I saw “the West” has a vacation trip when I was 10 years old. West through South Dakota and then into Wyoming. Every new vista amazed me. I had never seen a mountain until that trip through Wyoming, then Utah, and eventually SoCal.
Yes, the ocean was interesting, but the wide open spaces of the west really got my attention. We traveled through Colorado on the way back home, but Colorado was my home, waiting for me to arrive. The sight of the Rockies to the west and the majesty of the plains to the east were exactly where I needed to be. Sadly, things have changed, sociologically, making Colorado no longer the place it once was, but the physical place is my idea of paradise.
BTW, not delivering letters really surprises me. A postal service is usually pretty important in the development of any nation. I understand that the world has changed, but there are transactions which I feel need to be on paper.
Wonder how it will work out.
Poorly, I suspect.
Yeah, I think so too.
That’s interesting about Denmark. I guess for me to send a letter there, I will have to find a private carrier. That’s going to complicate a lot of international postal agreements.
They have had their postal service for 400 years. I don’t know how it will affect international mail.
It strikes me as problematic. Our civilization took some time to build, and there seems to be a school of thought which wants to turn its back on the progress we’ve made over the centuries.
New technologies are amazing, but I have long felt that they have jumped into some of these too quickly. Any number of small, and even larger businesses have wholesale moved their phone systems to a cloud based system which is highly dependent upon external systems. If any of these go down, innumerable companies, and even individuals will have no phone service. We need to preserve the value of some of these legacy systems, such as hard-wired phones and delivery of physical mail.
You are so right. During hurricane Sandy’s 5 day power outage, the only light in our apartment was the button on my land line phone.
It’s scary, but the headlong rush to adopt new technologies with little forethought has only increased. I have the sinking feeling that we are reliving Babel.
Adopting a new technology is fine, but don’t throw the old one away too fast.
Exactly, and that’s the bulk of my point, although there are serious concerns regarding the loss of privacy, as well. In the Guthrie abduction, two homes were surrounded by the SWAT team and searched, merely because their mobile telephones were found to be in the vicinity of Nancy Guthrie’s home at a particular time. I would hate to have to face a SWAT team and have my home disrupted just because I happened to drive nearby to a crime scene. (In this case, the crime scene is halfway between two major shopping centers and near several major thoroughfares.)
Concerns about privacy are starting to be raised on many fronts, and our headlong rush into technology has opened the door to this. Computers, the Internet and mobile telephony have given us much in the way of good things, but it has also brought some serious concerns along for the ride.
We, as a species, tend never to think very far ahead. Just jump in with both feet.
Very true.