There seems to be a vengeful ghost in my Yahoo! Weather widget (which I keep on my “My Yahoo” home page). It keeps showing me the weather in Sundsvall Sweden and Sunnyvale CA in addition to Oshkosh. When I delete these locations, they arise from the dead next time I log in. This wouldn’t be so annoying, except for the fact that the weather in Oshkosh is invariably colder than the weather in Sweden, and of course MUCH colder than Sunnyvale. And to add injury to insult, we’re expecting 8-12 inches of snow in the next 36 hours.
Oh Ullr, why dost thou taunt me so?
Years ago I had a job offer in Los Angeles and was giving some thought to moving there. I talked to several people that had lived there and one of the comments that stuck with me was that a key component of the California mindset is the reality that at any moment an earthquake could devastate so much. The theory went that that thought affects the way people approach life there, if only unconsciously.
Now I wonder if there is a similar, but much more frozen component in the Wisconsin collective mindset. Not so much that we’ll be wiped out, but we know for certain that for almost half of each year we’ll be essentially attacked by nature. At a minimum it physically hurts just to step outside, and in the worst case it can truly be deadly. And the amazing thing is we choose to live in it.
The flip side of that is the most intriguing to me. That is, the way we try to double down in our summers as if to make up for this nonsense and squeeze an entire year’s worth of living into a few months. Businesses close early on Fridays, churches cut way back or cancel services altogether, etc. You can forget about finding an open date on anyone’s calendar as they rush to their cottages or off on vacation.
Then once again, it’s back in the freezer we go to wait it out until next June, almost as if we’re wrapped in tinfoil and labeled with a date, hoping to survive to be thawed at some future date. It’s a wonder we don’t live longer here than other parts of the world. I would think being frozen for 4 – 5 months a year would increase our lifespans, but apparently all it does is lower our IQ a tad so that somehow escaping to warmer climates seems like a bad idea.
Having lived in L.A. for 25 years prior to moving here, I’d have to say that it’s pretty much a 6-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other sort of trade off, given the winters here and the various problems there (even beyond the earthquakes). The bottom line, of course, is that no place is perfect…
I was about to make an exception for Hawaii, which I still consider my home state, but then I remembered the ridiculous cost of living, the relatively low salaries (even by midwest standards), and the ever-growing population density (although the slow traffic on the freeways at rush hour is somewhat compensated for by the beauty of the scenery).
Having lived through the ‘94 Northridge quake (we were just 2 miles from the 7.0 epicenter), I can tell you that it was no fun for a couple of months, and psychic scars were left. They were somewhat similar to the scars produced by slipping and falling repeated on the ice. Wariness ensues. As you pointed out, here the wariness lasts about 6 months. There it lasts year-round. And there are no Yaktrax for earthquakes. Choose your psychic toxicity.