Now THAT'S A Lot of Snow!

TUESDAY. While browsing the national news headlines this morning I came across this photo of a Kansas farm buried in 15 foot drifts. It makes our Albuquerque snowfall look like a mere dusting. The story accompanying the photo told of tens of thousands of people in the Plains still without power.

It was very cold again last night in Albuquerque. The heat kept kicking in all through the night. We'd turned the heat back before bedtime, as we always do, to a chilly 58 degrees. My brain spins thinking of spending a night without heat when the mercury outdoors is hovering in the low teens. Still, with a fireplace, plenty of wood, a few candles, bags of rice and beans, water, and a few chocolate bars, we'd survive.

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part VII: We never lost power during the storm.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. When I finish this entry I'm reviving the eFax service I maintained when cyclones threatened, requiring several evacuations during two consecutive Florida hurricane summers. It's quite handy when a fax line isn't available. Last summer I left Florida, in part, due to frequent business interruptions that seemed to occur regularly because of the weather. New Mexico weather seemed fairly stable in comparison. Mild winters, sunny days, and very little precipitation lured me from the unsettled East Coast. What I failed to consider was, as the planet warms, interruptions and inconveniences are more apt to occur anywhere. No location is immune from the effects of climate change.

The global warming debate continues, especially in the higher ranks of government, yet science is demonstrating, without a doubt, that our climate is changing in ways we've never known. The question we all need to address is how we can individually help restore normalcy to a planet in crisis. Short of erecting a windmill in my back yard and driving an electric car, I'm not sure how I can make a major impact. Yet, more and more I find myself doing the small things that add up: flipping light switches off when I leave a room, gradually replacing all our bulbs with energy-saving fluorescents, conserving water (washing dishes under running water is a really hard habit to break), and reducing my overall impact on CO2 usage.

If you haven't already seen An Inconvenient Truth, I urge you to rent the DVD.

It's quite possible that I need to moderate my self-imposed news blackout in 2007, and start paying attention to what's happening environmentally. The bad news is that the planet is in trouble. The good news is that we can turn this around. For more info on what you can do, click here.