FoxTrax Blog

So I ran across the following headline on CNN.com:


My first thought was, "that's not a very nice thing to say about Iowans", but I read on and learned that Iowa is actually the home of North America's lead orangutan and bonobo research centers. Research has been at a standstill with the rising water.

I don't mean to make light of an ongoing catastrophe, merely to comment that science and technology are wonderful things, but apparently we're still beholden to natural disasters. Decorah, Iowa, issued an order to its citizens to not flush their toilets for fear that the sanitary system might fail. And it got me to thinking. Today it is virtually impossible to get around in life without a cell phone. Ten years ago this wasn't the case, but today we take that technology for granted. My grandparents have a cellphone. It's considered a necessity.

And I imagine suddenly having to do without a flushing toilet might change one's perspective on that.

The good news is that, thanks to the experience with rising rivers in 1993, Iowans have been better-prepared for this flood and a lot of the potential damage has been averted (although a lot of damage has still occurred). The estimated death toll is between 1 and 6, which is pretty encouraging as disasters go. Also, the citizens of Decorah are allowed to flush their toilets again (albeit they're encouraged to do so carefully... whatever that might mean), and the apes, well, the apes are just fine.

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Labels: current events, weather

So we had an earthquake this morning, which is unusual for the Midwest. A 5.4 on the Richter hit at 4:37 AM about six miles outside of West Salem, Illinois and was felt as far away as Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky. It woke me up in St. Louis from 120 miles away.

And let me tell you how much I appreciated that.

I value my sleep, and when it’s disrupted by insignificant little things like, say, earthquakes, well… let’s just say that it does nothing to abate my normal level of AM crankiness. And it’s not just the sleep. Gas jumped another dime in St. Louis yesterday. It’s overcast and drizzly (just in the time for the weekend, and after two gloriously sunny days, no less). We’re out of coffee at the office. On the whole it’s kind of a dreary morning, made worse because it’s a dreary morning without coffee.

It’s as though some cosmic force were shouting at me through a megaphone: “Go back to sleep!” Okay, maybe not shouting through a megaphone, maybe just humming it over soothing music, but you get my point. It’s mornings like this in which the alarm goes off and the brain immediately begins to engage in that precarious snooze-alarm calculus. You begin to tell yourself things like “of course I can take a shower in a two minutes” and “my thirty-minute commute really only takes twenty” and the like.

But I made it in today, on time, and it’s Friday, and it’s hard to be in a bad mood on Friday. And the weather is bleak, but the weather in Missouri never sticks around very long, anyway. So “Happy Friday” and have a good weekend.

Labels: weather