nmqt

-Geologist quote: "That kills petroleum", on the flaw in using plastic instead of paper so one does not kill trees-

Again the most interesting dream I had this week was last night's. I was a sophomore in college, for some reason touring another college (which would have made no sense to junior transfer to, since it was a liberal arts school and the college I was currently at was an awesome engineering school) which coincidentally had exactly the same rooms as my "current" college had, except they were larger, laid out differently, and had different names. But trust me, these were the same rooms -- dream intuition said so.

As anticipated, the seasons here in Colorado have some characteristics absent from Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM seasons. For one, their existence.

Also snow, which so far has been rather light and none too permanent, and also -- to my untrained eyes -- almost indistinguishable from rain. Be it said that most of the snowfalls have been at night, so the lighting is poor... but even then, it's obvious I've never seen the stuff fall out of the sky before. All the times I'd seen it before, the snow was already sitting on the ground because I went somewhere with snow on it. Snow does not come to me. Except in Colorado.

Autumn leaf fall is just as spectacular as the poets say. I'm used to having maybe one tree on my street that drops leaves, and in that case they sort of turn muckish-brownish-yellow and kind of just lie on the sidewalk. Here, of course, I can actually watch leaves turn bright red and real buttery yellow, then make their little stampedes across the street when the wind flicks them around and around.

Speaking of wind... that's one thing that's surprised me. There is so little of it compared to GDDoD levels that I can actually go around in short sleeves in numerical temperatures I thought would be cripplingly cold. So far I haven't had any day that's felt colder than anything I've experienced before, which is startling. I really expected to be frozen solid by this time of the year.

On the other hand, it is only fall, although the weather appears wintery to me. Perhaps that's why I don't feel it's any colder -- I have just so fully convinced myself that it's actually winter that the temperatures are a bit more acceptable.

I hear in winter it'll start getting into single or negative digits of Farenheit as well as getting significantly windier. Windy I can understand, but my brain is incapable at this stage of comprehending single digit temperatures, let alone negative.

We'll see how I hold up then.

Reality check. And for my readers across the pond, do keep in mind that anything under 32 degrees Farenheit is negative Celsius -- I'm positive I've experienced single digit Celsius temperatures before (read: I'm not THAT much of a wimp).