Where it all begins

Today's weather is taking me back to my years in Connecticut, in New Haven and Yale University.

One of the only times I took a sojourn for the holidays back here in Los Angeles, I remember taking a flight back... when we left LA, the temperature was 80, and when we landed, it was 8.

I also remember the amazing temperature truths about snow...

Snow can only fall as snow between 28 and 32F. Warmer, and it's slush or rain, and colder, it's ice.

Which means that we used to live for the days it warmed up enough to snow.

Another gift of MS, and one of the oddest... my progressive went wicked progressive here in Pasadena, in southern California. I'm pretty cold sensitive nowadays, but dealing with "it's down to 50 something" is a hell of a lot easier to deal with then "it's down to minus something." Which it too often was, back in the day back there.

And that being wheelchair-bound happened here, not there; a lot of the new construction has been to make things actually ADA compliant, but given the madness of stairs there... By some counts, that library you see in photo above, in the background on the right, has something like sixteen floors.

I have personally walked up ten of them, back in the 70's.

Yale is much like Hogwart's... The stairways do move, but over the course of years, not hours.

But it's an interesting life to live, nowadays... Some days, even here in Pasadena, the cold is bitter, or it's profound, or it's invigorating, or maybe even just cold. Ranges between crippling and "well, it is cold, isn't it?"

Certainly brings one back to what a friend of mine said he learned at the Zen center...

Pay attention.

What else is there to do? This is where everything else begins...