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Here I am, knitting away. Can't show you, I'd have to kill you.

Here's where I'm going soon. Charlotte sent me this from her phone THIS morning. It SNOWED in Snohomish, WA, yesterday. And, it's still snowing there!!

Lobo in the snow


Lobo is a Desert Wolf Dog. He doesn't KNOW snow. Not that he cares. Would you LOOK at the fur on that animal? Charlotte doesn't have 'dust bunnies' in her house, she has 'wolf bunnies.'

I'm sure he'll be a 'snow expert' by the time Luna gets there. Lobo and Luna always have fun together. She misses him when they're not together; Luna loves her some Lobo Wolf Dog.

Jes, this snow-drive scares me a lot. I have 4-wheel drive on the Suzk and I have driven in snow in it before. But it's not a thought that makes me happy. I have mountain passes I have to go thru. BIG mountain passes, two of them if I remember right. I'm hoping my 2-day Holiday Train drive doesn't turn into a 3-day Holiday Train drive. Yuck. Even in no-snow driving, it takes me two 13-hour drive days to get there. Add snow in and who knows how long. Plus, I'm missing 4 hours of daylight each day with Daylight Saving Time.

Maybe I'll get a weather break. And, I've never put chains on the Suzk before. I haven't put chains on a vehicle in over 25 years. Hope I remember how. Maybe I need AAA Roadside Insurance? Do they help with that? Maybe I'll get a weather break. We'll know in a couple of weeks, won't we.

Carnival of the Vanities: Week 167 is up. Always some interesting tidbits there if you need a break from....anything.

Is having a child -- even one -- environmentally destructive?

In 1994, Charles Hall, an ecologist at SUNY Syracuse, performed a life-cycle analysis of the average American (PDF file) by determining each person's lifetime share of the nation's total consumption of various resources. It's the kind of study usually undertaken for assessing the impacts of a new product or policy, and the results are unsettling.

Hall and his colleagues found that a single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for:

~22 million pounds of liquid waste and
~2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste.

He or she will have a lifetime consumption of:

~4,000 barrels of oil,
~1.5 million pounds of minerals and
~62,000 pounds of animal products that will entail the slaughter of
~ 2,000 animals.

"In terms of energy usage alone, [which is] a convenient measure of environmental impact," Knight says, "the average Ethiopian uses one 310th of what we use. So when an American couple stops at two kids it's like an Ethiopian couple stopping at 620."

Well, I guess THAT question has been answered. And I bet those numbers have gone UP considering how we farm, wrap and distribute goods ELEVEN years later....which is now.

HA!! And they're not even factoring in all the WRAPPING in the old figures-- whether it's the wrapping of the product from the manufacturer or the store, to what we wrap our holidays packages in. Sad and scary facts.

WebCam of the Week: The Tort Cam at the Darwin American Museum of Natural History. Mr. Tuttles' Big Brothers.

Simply Recipe's "Gnocchi Alla Romana"

I think the environment should be put in the category of our National Security.Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.Otherwise what is there to defend?
--Robert Redford