I Need Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

I miss the sun.

It’s funny- I always complained that there was too much sun when I lived in L.A. and I missed non sunny weather too much. Now it seems, I’m unable to be content and now I’m complaining that I don’t like the rain.

The thing is, I do like rain. I like it a lot. It has a place. It’s necessary to make things grow. I’m just a little fed up of it. We haven’t had a real spring sunny day in a very long time. Last week, when the sun did actually shine it was on a very hot, muggy day that didn’t feel very springlike at all.

Today, we have a constant drizzle. It’s grey. It’s cold. It’s very un-Maylike. I’m a little sad about that. I like spring because it’s refreshing and pretty and green.

This spring, so far, has been grey, wet and green. It hasn’t been very refreshing.

I keep trying to see the bright side of all the rain. It’s not that it’s even good for the garden because the garden is so saturated, there’s nowhere for the rain to go. I’d say that it was nice to have an excuse to stay inside but I don’t want an excuse to stay inside.

Still, whining doesn’t help the fact that the sun isn’t supposed to shine much this week and, so far, the weather for the weekend is yet more rain.

It also doesn’t help the fact that I think everyone in this corner of the world feels the same way. Still, things could always be worse. Given the flooding down south and the tornadoes in Alabama, I think we’re pretty lucky.

It’s actually amazing how much the weather affects our moods though, isn’t it? In October, we welcome the first real ‘cold snap’ of the year and the dropping temperatures and welcome the autumn chill so we can start wearing warmer clothes, drinking hot beverages and enjoying the pumpkin-infused Fall. Then, by the beginning of January after the glow of the holidays is over and all that’s left is a stark new year, we’re longing for warmth and sunshine.

After a period of greyness like we’ve had, I’ve noticed that almost everyone feels the same way: sluggish, slightly crotchety and irritated that we’re being deprived of time outdoors. After all, here in the Midwest, we spent December through March inside because it was too cold and snowy/rainy to go outside. By April, we want to embrace the springtime.

It was ok in April. Though we got fed up of rain, the saying goes “April Showers Bring May Flowers.”

It’s just that May seems to have forgotten the flowers and is continuing with the showers.

I feel like a toddler that has been trapped inside too long. I want to run around, tilt my face up to the sunshine and smell the lilacs. Instead, my lilac bush appears to have given up and died because the roots got too wet. I’m sad about that. I had about two days of blossoming lilacs and they the bush started to go a rather alarming shade of dying green. I want to sit outside on my patio and feel the cool Spring evening start to move in on the warmth of the day.

Still, there is one bright side to all this rain: There’s always hope for a sunny tomorrow. When the sun does shine, we appreciate it more. This is why, in my neighbourhood, at the mere hint of sunshine, the cacophony of a hundred mowers rises into the air.

In the meantime, some people actually have decided that drizzle and light rain is a perfectly acceptable accompaniment to mowing and the sound of a lone mower often accompanies the greyness. The kids on my street have started playing outside when the rain is light, wearing raincoats and playing their normal games. I suppose there comes a time when you realize that the rain isn’t going to stop but it shouldn’t stop you.

Maybe that’s what I need to take from this. I need to get myself a pair of non-leaky wellington boots and a rain jacket and ignore the fact that the rain is coming down. After all, when it’s wet, the weeds come up a little easier and it’s easier to dig.

After all, that’s how the world has functioned through the centuries, right? By adapting and evolving. So, maybe I’ll adapt and evolve and pretend that I live in Seattle where it rains a lot.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep up that hope that, maybe, just maybe, it won’t be raining tomorrow.

Happy Tuesday!

Technology... Evolution...Reflections

Sometimes I wonder what we did before we had the internet.

I know there was a time when it didn’t exist because I actually remember that time. Sadly, I can remember computers when the movie, “War Games,” almost seemed like science fiction. I mean, that movie has Matthew Broderick hooking up a phone to get his computer to talk to another. Nowadays, people would laugh at it and say, “wow- that’s the olden days!”. (Confession: I watched that movie last year and actually did laugh at it and say “that’s the olden days!”)

However, back in 1980-whatever when that film came out, it was amazing to consider that a computer could talk to another one. I’m revealing my age here but I remember when the first home computers started coming out. We used to load games with a tape recorder on a cassette tape. If you bumped the tape recorder, the game would crash and you’d start over. It would take up to a couple of hours to load a game. Anything under an hour was amazing.

I feel like my generation has actually watched this evolution of technology from the very beginning. Certainly, there were computers way before my family owned their first Sinclair Spectrum (that ended up being defective so we swapped it for a Commodore 64). However, the Commodore 64 was one of the first mainstream machines to actually be small enough and usable enough that it could sit in the living room and be used for games and other purposes.

After that, things started moving fast. Cassette recorders gave way to rather large floppy disks that you could cut in half with a pair of scissors and loaded WAY faster than cassette recorders. Then the floppy disks started shrinking and, finally, after several different versions are now becoming obsolete in favour of flash drives and portable hard drives.

It’s interesting to be from this generation because we know what life was like before the internet and we know what life is with it. It was only when I was in college that we were really able to get online. It was before the world wide web even really got going that I got my first email address and all we could do were find usenet groups and use Unix to do stuff online. Then within a year, there was Webcrawler and Lycos and, well, that’s pretty much where the internet became a part of life.

Yet before those days, we used to have to physically go to stores to buy stuff. We used to have to go to the library to look something up. We used to have to discuss TV shows, books and movies in person or over the phone. We had less self-diagnosed ailments because it was way harder to self-diagnose without Web-MD and way more work. If someone had termites in their house, they’d have to wait until the next business day to call someone to take care of them. They couldn’t make an appointment online five minutes after the termites were discovered.

You probably get my point: Life moved slower. At the risk of sounding like an old cranky grandmother, back in the olden days, we had to do more for ourselves and we had to have more social interaction.

It’s a toss-up as to which was better. I’m a self-confessed internet junkie. It supports to my need for instant gratification of information. If I’m trying to figure out what that weird metal thing is that flew up out of my old lawnmower when it exploded, I can go online and do a quick Google to discover it was a piston. If I decide I’m craving cauliflower cheese for dinner, I can go online and find a good recipe and figure out if I need to go to Kroger before I go home.

The internet does make it easier to avoid talking to people. In my job, we can approach candidates via phone or email. I tend to choose email. My coworker prefers the phone. He’s older than me. This is not an insult, just a fact. I don’t choose email because I’m a coward or I’m shy. I choose email because it’s what I’m used to and from my point of view, I find it far less intrusive than a phone call. I make calls when they’re necessary or I need to move really fast but if I’m just trying to see if someone’s interested in a job, I think email is very effective. When you cold call them, they tend to be irritated because you’re bothering them at work and they say “Send me an email” anyway. Also, email gives them a way to get in touch with you whenever they have time which is why I get a lot of emails after midnight.

Yet I don’t hide behind email. I use it as the tool for which it was invented. I still make sure I interact with people. The idea of not being able to meet people and talk to people is a little alarming to me yet it’s becoming more and more frequent. Sure, the younger generation interacts but they do it on Facebook and via text and via instant messenger. It makes it far easier to stay inside and be a hermit than it used to.

It’s just weird to consider life without the internet. I was reflecting back on that today which is what inspired this blog. I remember life without the internet. It really wasn’t so different just a little less…virtual. I used to be addicted to the set of Encyclopedia Brittanica’s that had been left in our house by the previous owners. They were missing one of the “M”’s which was a pain in the rear but I still made full use of them. I went to the library a lot more. I went to the mall. I read more magazines.

You get the picture. There was life before the internet and it’s a life I remember. It’s just now, I use it constantly at work and at home. For work, it’s our lifesource- it’s how we find resumes and resumes find us. At home, it’s my tool for everything from the pups having an upset tummy to me having to order a new Lawnmower from Home Depot and finding out which is the best model and value for money.

It’s really amazing how life evolves and it happens so quickly but, simultaneously, so gradually that we don’t really notice. It’s only when we stop and actually look back that we see how far things have come and in how short of a time. I’m sure the same can be said for many things in life but, for me, it’s in technology I notice it most. It’s not just the evolution of life from the actual to the virtual but the streamlining of the technology itself. We no longer have the giant, clumsy computers and mainframes from “War Games.” We have tiny, thin, light-as-a-feather laptops that we can shove in a backpack. We now watch movies without having to insert anything into a machine instead of massive videotapes that could get chewed up if you forgot to clean the player.

I could go on and on. It’s just weird to look back to less than 20 years ago and think that there was yet to be a Google or an Amazon.com or an iTunes when these things are such a part of our lives nowadays. In a way, it forced us to be more self-sufficient but, in a way, we wasted a lot of time and a lot more gas to get places.

As with everything there are pluses and negatives. However, even though it’s a massive time waster and allows us to hide behind our electronic personas, I choose to think that the invention of the internet is a good thing.

After all, without the internet, I wouldn’t be blogging about there being an internet. Which is actually quite surreal when I stop and think about it.

Perhaps I better not. This blog is long enough already.

Happy Friday, have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

Spring Awakening

Spring is usurping Winter’s territory.

Two weeks ago, our lawns were covered with piles of shoveled snow. The roads were matte white with salt. It was too cold to stay outside for long, even when wearing a thick winter coat and gloves.

Today, it was over sixty degrees, the sun was shining and the sky was blue. Even the most stubborn piles of snow and ice relented and disappeared. I caught sight of the first green of daffodils poking up in my back garden.

I will say, it’s a nice change. I could actually wear something other than bulky sweaters and trousers to work today. My coat was a lighter one than usual. The puppies are spending much longer outside than they have been and are having the best time playing and tussling in the balmy air.

It’s no surprise or secret that I love snow. I blog about it far too often but I do love it. However, I also love Spring. I love the creeping greenness that begins to take over the gloom and spreads until the lawns are a carpet of new grass and the trees are a haze of new leaves. Normally, Spring doesn’t get her due- Summer greedily pushes in with her humidity, dry earth and heat. All of a sudden, it’s not longer time to plant but, instead, time to maintain things that you’ve planted. The weeding you intended to do isn’t finished but it’s too hot outside to do much for long periods. So, despite my love of Winter and her snowy magic, I’m quite happy if Spring starts a little earlier this year. I’ve been very fortunate and have had lots of snowy days this winter. If I didn’t get any more, I’d still be satisfied.

I know it’s too early to celebrate the change of the seasons. Calendar-wise, Spring isn’t due for another month. However, these days, whether it’s global warming or just the evolution of the earth, the seasons seem a little different these days. Summer seems a little hotter. Winter doesn’t seem quite so cold.

When we first moved to the States, I remember days when the wind chill was 30 below and they cancelled school because it was too cold to be exposed to the air. Now, it seems that it just doesn’t get that cold anymore. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still frigid but it lacks that Antarctic slap of cold that I remember. I know in England, their seasons have changed a little too. It used to stay mostly in the 70’s during the summer. Sometimes, it would climb into the ‘80’s but not frequently. When we’d go to the beach, we’d wear our swimming costumes with a towel over us as we shivered. The ocean was freezing but after a while, we adjusted and it started to feel warm. Yet when we weren’t swimming, we’d often be covered with goosepimples because it wasn’t really warm enough to be at the beach but, well, we wanted to be and it was summer and that’s what you did.

Now, for the past few summers, it’s been downright hot there. Last summer, our relatives were complaining of it being in the ‘90’s. There isn’t much air conditioning in England so I can only imagine how unbearable that felt. Winter too has evolved. We used to maybe get one or two snowfalls a year in the UK. Sometimes, it’d be deep enough to build a snowman but not terribly often. This year, they had a massive snow/ice storm that stranded people at airports, kept people stuck inside their homes and pretty much crippled the southern part of the country.

So, I think it’s true that the climate is evolving, at least in the evidence I see. Thus, following this logic, I think it might actually be ok that Spring is spreading her wings over our part of the world and making us forget the dreariness of winter. It’d be ok if she stayed, too. It would give us longer to plant and get our gardens ready and give us more flowers.

It’s easy to forget the dark days of winter when the world is blah and grey, there’s only cold and damp, no snow to make things seem even remotely magical when the sun is shining and you can throw your head back, soak up the sun and enjoy the warm breeze on your cheek.

Of course, despite the fact that I say it’s ok if Spring stays, the truth is that she’s still treading on Winter’s territory and, at any time, Winter can stand up and take control again. Granted, it would be the type of control that an ousted leader who is waiting to be replaced has but nevertheless, she has the right.

Still, for now, we have a taste of Spring and even if Winter edges her way back in, it’s going to lack the oomph that she had before because we now know that no matter what she throws at us, it’s only a short while before her time is up and she has to step back and let Spring have her say for good.

I, however, don’t mind if Spring borrows a few of Winter’s days. It’s a nice change and change can be a very good thing indeed.

Happy Thursday