Can We Talk About the Weather?

Using NLV and Las Vegas's brilliant network of surface roads, I was able to meet up with Krista tonight, because apparently we are planning a trip together! I refuse to tell you anything about it until it happens (unless you already know about it), because it will be really good blog fodder and I want your anticipation to build all the way up through Thanksgiving. I bring this up because at the end of our visit/planning session, we discussed how late our blogs have been posting recently.

On my way home, I stopped at my trusty CVS for provisions and hair dye. They were out of my preferred color, "spiced truffle." They have apparently dropped the truffles in favor of the pralines. I hate fashion. I have met the pralines before. I have a special word for praline. I call it, "orange." Therefore, I'll keep this post short because I have an appointment with something called "medium golden mahogany brown." Seriously!?!? A.k.a. "chocolate carmel." Post-apocalypse I shall use my handy teacher scissors to cut off my hair myself and let my natural gray do its thang with reckless abandon.

Whist trolling the aisles at the CVS, a day late and a dollar short I came upon the September issue of National Geographic. Cover: "What's Up With the Weather?" Photo: Huge tornado that Tom Skilling would call, "ominous."

Apparently, there were 14 extreme weather events in the United States last year, more than there have ever been. Each cost at least a billion dollars in damage, and worldwide the cost of weather-related disasters totaled more than $150 billion.

Signs and omens, kids, signs and omens.

Other news from above-the-fold: avoid armadillos. Apparently they cause leprosy.

I have been put in charge of finding a writing prompt for next week's departmental assessment. There's a video. I used to have a nifty youtube downloader tool, but I no longer have that. You can see the video here, but the children can't. The poor, poor children will have to...ugh!...read. Most students agree that maps will go the way of the dinosaurs. Most students don't believe in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

To their credit.

We're going to ask them to write about it.

I hope that they do a good job. Wish us luck.

Tying the Knot

First of all, it's good to see Pastor Dana of Kaleidoscope Faith back in business! She's been gone so long I almost forgot how to spell "kaleidoscope."

In other news, I started thinking about tying knots when I put a knot-tying toy on my amazon.com wishlist sometime last summer. I received this for Christmas from my parents:

First of all, let me just say that in the current political climate, when women are not being allowed to testify on the House floor about women's health issues, and Rick Santorum calls unwanted pregnancies, "a gift from God," far be it from me to advocate a sexist toy.

Therefore, please forgive me for a moment while I let my sarcastic show: BECAUSE GIRLS DON'T NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TIE KNOTS!!! *huff*

As my foray into knitting proves, apparently in order to learn a skill, my particular style requires that I:
1) read about it      2) see someone else do it in real life and      3) watch a ton of youtube videos about it.

Therefore, I followed the instructions in the All-American Sexist Knot-Tying Toy and then went to a knot-tying class at REI, where I experienced loads of social anxiety due to the absence of Miss Gokey. Soon, however, I was enjoying practicing the knots the instructor showed us, and then forgetting how to tie them IMMEDIATELY after we finished and moved on.

I supposedly "learned" a square knot (which I think I can do like a champ, but Amanda says this guy is doing it the right way, and this way is nothing like the way the REI instructor did it), a fisherman's knot (I can do this, but only with the help of the youtube video), a bowline knot (whaaaaat?), a clove hitch (this will require more practice), a taut line knot (I did this successfully in class, but I can't seem to make heads or tails out of the video), a figure 8 knot (huzzah! and [in the case of the video] British!) and finally a water knot which I'm not even going to hyperlink because it seemed so confusing and useless to me.

So...that's how you can get for free what I also got for free. Thanks to the sexist knot toy, for a little bit of someone else's money I also have a practice set of ropes and a tiny hitch.

Since I know that by this point you're saying, "surely these knots aren't the only reason I'm reading this post," when really they are, I'll go ahead and tell you what disasters are trending today on the Doomsday Dashboard. It seems nuclear war has overtaken pandemic as most popular, ringing in at 27%.