Take-off is scary, but landing is nice.

I returned from three lovely days in California to a depressingly consistent 10-day forecast, chock full of gray, 20-degree weather. At least there is snow on the ground now. There seems to be a general consensus among both camps of people—those who like winter (they exist, believe it or not, and there are more of them than I ever would have expected) and those who don’t—that snow in January is a desirable thing. In the first camp, snow is simply what one would expect in winter and a lack of it is just plain wrong. And in the second camp the general feeling is that if it’s going to be cold (and, unfortunately, it is) then there might as well be some snow on the ground to ensure that there’s some point to the temperatures.

You know which camp I belong to.

As we flew over the plains yesterday afternoon, before the sun went down, I was surprised to see just how much snow there was on the ground. In sparsely populated areas the snow was almost all you could see—and endless blanket of it broken up only by a wide gridwork of country roads with tiny gray-brown squares at the inhabited corners. I was a little startled by the almost endless white; that is a lot of unbroken snow.

Did you know that it was seventy degrees in Athens, Georgia on Martin Luther King Day? That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Anyway, I had a nice trip. I enjoyed the conference pre-session I flew out for, and I enjoyed the visit with my parents. I got to try one of those Brazilian restaurants I have heard so much about. Since I’m not a big meat eater, I certainly wouldn’t go there every week, but the food (even the steak, and I've never liked steak) was really good and it was a fun experience. I also ran the Sacred Heart loop (slightly shortened) without Eric since we didn’t get to do it at Christmastime for reasons I will leave unspecified, and it was nice but not quite the same. I soaked up some sun when I could and admired the California sunsets, and returned to face a few more months of cold, gray Michigan, which actually isn’t that bad so long as the wind stays calm.

Other than that I have not much to write and very little time in which to write it, so I’ll leave it at that. Maybe I’ll write more of interest later on this week.