Let there be....grass?????

Christmas is tomorrow (already?????) and it looks like it will be a white one...barely.  Seriously, we have less than an inch of snow on the ground and we only have that because of snow fall a couple days ago.  December is a month when the Christmas spirit is supposed to be augmented by the white falling water crystals like how you get the sneak-attack bonus while using an enchanted weapon (sorry...might have been up too late last night playing Skyrim).  Instead, we had to deal with patches of ice and fields of frozen mud and dead grass all month.  How freaking depressing!

At least we have some snow, though.  And I'm hoping that this little tiny snow we have will stay through at least tomorrow.  Unfortunately, tomorrow is supposed to get past the magic number (32) in temperature, and the next day warmer still.  Goodbye snow- I sure will miss you! 

Sadly it seems that my moving to Marquette has effectively killed the Epic Snowstorm industry that I have heard so much about.  I wouldn't be surprised if the six winters I've been up here are the six worst years in terms of accumulated snow fall.  I also wouldn't be surprised if you told me the sun revolves around me.

So in order to keep myself from gluing cotton balls all over the front yard in order to stave off the depression, I've been pondering global warming.  Probably doesn't seem like something you'd want to think about to try and keep from being depressed about the weather, but that's the way my mind works.  I think about global warming, and the effects that it might have on, say, weak snow storms where I'm at and huge snow storms in places that aren't supposed to get huge snow storms.  And now I'm depressed again.  AARRGGHH (runs off to watch Frosty Returns). 

As far as global warming goes, I personally know just enough to have an extremely uninformed opinion, so if you came here looking for the usual wisdom, counsel, and guidance that I usually offer...well then stick around, because that's exactly what you're going to get.  Merry ChristMAS!!!

Admittedly, I should know more about the subject.  But even though I'm (for all intents and purposes, willfully) ignorant,  I do try to do my part to be an ecologically responsible citizen.  I walk to work sometimes (hopefully more frequently when the weather warms up).  I shut lights off in rooms that I'm not in.  I recycle.  I eat cardboard (not true).  Sometimes I even hold my breath- anything to reduce my personal carbon foot print. 

But sometimesI wonder if this climate change is just a natural thing that we're caught in the middle of and global warming is our attempt to understand and make sense of it.  Sure, that's a tremendous simplification.  Still, think about various times in our history when things were drastically different than they are now.  The ice age, for example.  Obviously the Earth was not always covered in ice- it gradually had to change to get that way- except that it's not still covered in ice, so clearly there was another ginormous gradual change.  And yet, here we are today, after all that massive change and the countless tragedies in terms of the loss of plant and animal life.  Ta-da!

Our world today did not just happen like some magical pop-up book.  The world as we know it has been violently shaken and crafted by the impartially cruel forces of nature.  And it will continue to happen, regardless of what we do or don't do.  Maybe global warming, then, is less a 'thing' and more of a label to help us feel like we are at least a little bit in control of things that we are really not in control of at all. 

That doesn't mean that I am advocating for a hummer in every heated garage or loosened smog restrictions.  It bothers me that people are cutting down forests to make golf courses and luxury hotels.  I'm against the blatant misuse of resources.  I have kids, after all, and I would really like them to be able to grow up in a world that more resembles Max and Ruby than it does Mad Max (actually...scratch that, because that would mean that four-foot tall talking female rabbits would be the dominant species). 

For now all I wish is that we could have a white Christmas.  Just like the ones I used to know.