It was way too cold to try to get a picture of Ashley in her jacket. But I did want to report that she was a Very Good dog, and did the needful when I took her out in the bitter, bitter cold.
Since I was wearing a silk base layer, a mock-T, and my heavy Dale of Norway sweater under my Alaska pipeline coat, I was warm enough to stay outside for an extra three minutes, and shovel our little sidewalk.
I didn’t bother salting after. And these temperatures, what’d be the point?
Winston Churchill once said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” but I think maybe Churchill had never had a dog pull hard on the leash while they were walking across an icy parking lot.
Ashley really wants to go for a long walk. But she doesn’t want to go for a walk in the outside that actually exists. She wants to go for a walk in some other outside—one where it’s not windy and snowing.
I don’t think of myself as someone who wishes ill for others. I genuinely do not wish for anyone to come to harm. But I’m struggling just a bit with schadenfreude right now.
Take, as an example, the wildfires in California. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these fire events were not just entirely foreseeable; they were actually foreseen forty years ago. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people who apparently made the calculation that the views from a house on a hillside at the urban-chaparral interface were so good it was worth taking the risk—and especially so, given that a large fraction of the costs of fighting those fires, and insuring against financial loss, could be spread to other people. People like me.
I think I’m allowed a bit of, “I hope you are enjoying the entirely foreseeable consequences of your choices.”
As another example, take the snow about to hit New Orleans:
By Tuesday, the winter storm will drop freezing rain, sleet and likely several inches of snow onto south Louisiana, including in New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.
I have to admit that when people in red states face an extreme weather event that’s entirely to be expected, a certain part of me thinks, “Well, you could have voted for politicians and policies that would have greatly ameliorated climate change, but you didn’t. Enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of those choices.”
And, as a non-climate example, apparently a lot of black and brown male voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris. I suspect many of them will be surprised and saddened by the utterly predictable deportations of friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, and employees over the next few years. And I will be very sad about that—sad for the people deported and their friends and family, and also about the dreadful police actions that will be required to make them happen. But I hope I will be excused from feeling no sympathy for the bosses who find themselves having to pay up to get workers who haven’t been deported, and very little sympathy for the people who voted for these policies and find that everything they want to buy costs more.
“Welcome to the entirely foreseeable consequences of your actions as well.”
I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.
I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”
It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.
Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
I often claim that I like hot weather, to the point that I don’t mind exercising in the heat. However, the best thing about hot weather is that it gives me an excuse to sit in the shade, read, and drink beer.
I put Ashley in her new coat, put on my Alaska Pipeline coat, and went out into the bitter, bitter cold. Ashley would have liked to come right back in, but I made her stay outside until she had accomplished a couple of very important tasks. #dogsofmastodon
At the airport it’s currently -9°F, with a wind chill of -34°F (-37°C).
National Weather Service: “Destructive 80 mph winds.”
Jackie, wanting to be clear: “Not the constructive kind.”
After several days when the weather was too crappy for either me or Ashley to want to take a long walk, it was slightly better today, and I managed to get the pupster out for a pretty long walk.
