Welcome back to exploring my faulty memory with BigMike, I'm your host, BigMike,
Let us begin shall we?
During just the time I went to school, in those formative 12 years or so we lived in several different climates. We Lived in the Pacific Northwest in the State of Washington at McChord Air Force base (Now joint base Lewis-McChord), In the midwest in the state of Indiana in Indianapolis and in the wild wild west in the state of Montana in Great Falls on the airbase called Malmstrom Air Force Base, we also moved back to Indiana when my Dad got shipped off toTerrejon Spain for a couple of years but the climate is the climate even if separated by a few years in between.
As an adult, I lived in Indiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia and settled in Georgia. I drove a truck for a few years in between and experienced everything from the heat of Arizona (It's not the heat, its the humidity) to the cold of the Continental Divide. I have to say, my favorite was anything above 65* on a normal basis.
In the Pacific Northwest in Washington state, it rained. A lot. I mean I think it rained every day. At least it felt like it did although realistically I know it couldn't have rained every day. The thing I remember the most is all the adults always fiddling with umbrellas and windshields and windshield wipers. It seemed like one of the most important things that people did was check their wiper fluid levels when they got gas. Nothing worse than trying to see out of a muddy window with bad blades and no fluid.
In Indiana the problems were almost always centered around how cold it was. It would snow alright and then because the weather gods would want to screw with everyone, it would thaw a little bit and the BLAM freeze solid overnight. This would create frozen streets, sidewalks, and roads. It would mean everything was so damn slippery you couldn't make it to the car without busting your ass a couple of times, and everywhere you looked all the surfaces were covered with a thin sheet of ice. Icicles on the houses waiting to stab you in the eye, the locks on the doors of your cars were frozen shut because who could afford a garage right? and more importantly, you usually had to follow behind the snowplow to get to work and guess what he was doing? That's right spraying road salt out the back of the truck destroying your car in the process. It was great, why would anyone ever want to leave that crap? I just don't know. I absolutely hated shoveling snow.
In Montana the main issues were a lot like Indiana with two notable exceptions. One (1) It was colder than crap in the winter and when it snowed and it was usually well below zero a lot of the time, so the snow wasn't this wet heavy sticky messy snow like we got in Indiana, no sir, we had our own special snow. Our Montana snow was light and fluffy most of the time and there was usually a foot or two or three of it coming down coupled with well with a lot of below zero temperatures. That was awesome because (2) The wind. When you combined the three-foot snowfall of the light fluffy friendly snow with the horror film temperatures and your friend the wind guess what you get when this is all added together? You get mountains of drifting snow. Virtual 10-15 foot high mountains of snow. Do you think we got excused from school and took a snow day off though? This is my version of the walking backward through 6 feet of snow uphill both ways story.
Oh and my name wasn't Ferris Bueller, so we had to sit on that damn school bus after standing out in the colder than humans should be able to live in the wind and grind our way to school. I remember first hearing the term wind chill during this time. It would be 20 below zero and the wind chill would make it feel like it was -99* below zero. You had to plug in your car water and battery heaters every night if you thought you were going to have a prayer of your car starting the next morning. Almost every parking lot had power outlets in the parking spaces for plugging in.
The mind can't comprehend this crap in the 6th grade and never having the first cup of coffee yet. We would go 10 miles per hour and be lined up behind a piece of Earthmoving equipment called a road grader which would plow the mountains of snow out of the way so the bus could make its way through. Some times if it was bad enough, the snowplows would fall behind the grader and finish topping off the roads so that travel was safe enough for us to make it to school. Those sonsabitches. We never got a snow day unless the snow turned to ice.
As an adult when we first moved to Georgia from Tennessee, the very first thing I did when the moving truck showed up was throw away my snow shovel and stopped using the terms blizzard, wind chill, and below zero. I am so over that crap.
Ideas that are different and mutually exclusive
- Plenty of people are weird and depending upon your perspective, it might include you, who knows? It seems like the rich are just getting weirder by the day though. Maybe it because of their higher visibility I don't know but strange things keep popping up. I generally love all things Elon Musk however this time he gets on the weird list with help from his girlfriend "Grimes" (a singer, never heard of her?). They named their baby a word that embodies characters that you have to have special instructions on how to type them, as it is not part of the 26 letter alphabet. I don't exactly know how to describe it except to say part of it looks like scientific notation.
Elon Musk is a nerd. He must know this, as he is just about the smartest person around. Did he forget what it was like to be a smart kid? Does he want his kid to get his ass beat every day just because he has a weird name? Kids are cruel and they will make fun of him just because his old man is a nerd, do they really want the burden of that name to carried with him too? I mean they better have an alternative like maybe "Gary" or this kid is gonna have a weird name and two permanent black eyes every day until 10th grade. - They are making a prequel Sopranos movie which is going to explore the character's lives before the TV series. It sounds cool and is supposed to be ready in March of 2021. The cool part is who they have cast to play young Tony. He is being played by none other than Michael Gandolfini, who is the late great James Gandolfini's son. I understand Ray Liotta has a role as well. I can't wait to see this, It is coming out on HBO, and that may make me want to get that channel again.
- The CDC has been effectively sidelined from making any suggestions, briefings recommendations advice that pertains to the coronavirus outbreak in any way. I mean why would you want the Centers for Disease Control talking about diseases?
How stupid is that? - This week and the weekend it is going to snow in New England and the NE USA. They are calling it historic not only because of it being the month of May but because some places could see as much as maybe 8-12 inches of new snow. Oh and it's going to reach record low temperatures, with maybe 40 mph wind gusts for 12 hours or more, and is going to affect about 75 million people. Tell me you are not staying at home in New York huh?
- They have arrested a suspect in a 29-year-old serial murder cold case based on a hit from a long-ago collected DNA sample. A guy named Clark Perry Baldwin, 59 Y/O was arrested and charged with 2 counts of murder in one case because his victim was 24 weeks pregnant at the time. He has also been charged in Wyoming.
Gotta love DNA testing. Now if they could just see the way clear to testing those 200-400 hundred thousand untested rape kits that are sitting around everywhere in police departments.
End the rape kit backlog - click the link to read more
BigMike
Love this. Im sharing
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