January 17, 2014
Dear Everyone:
It is unofficially “official”:
California is in the throes of a
Drought.
Again.
Never mind that winter is less than a month old.
This is “the driest winter” in (fill-in-the-blank time period.)
Woe is us.
Actually, this has happened before.
Many, many times.
Plants and animals that are indigenous to California have no problem.
It’s all those “extra” people who now live in California that
have the problem. Nearly
perfect weather tends to attract people.
Nearly perfect weather has its price:
Sometimes it doesn’t rain when you would like it to.
Many, many decades ago, when I was working in
San Francisco, I had a
co-worker who was a Professional Malcontent.
By this I mean she complained constantly about every subject
under the sun, did as little work as she possibly could, and the company
paid her a salary. Hence:
Professional Malcontent (PM).
This PM complained loudly about the fact that California was, once
again, in the throes of a Drought.
Somebody Should Do Something About It.
(Somebody other than her, of course.)
She even proposed “shipping all that rain from
Oregon and
Washington down here to California.”
After all, they had more than they needed.
I tried pointing out to her that it would take a tremendous amount of
energy to lift millions of gallons of water over 3900 feet into the air.
“What are you talking about?”
Well, the Siskiyou mountain range separates Oregon and California and
the pass that we drive through every year is just above 3900 feet, so
that’s how far up you would have to pump all that water to get it from
Oregon into California.
She told me I was “just being obstructionist.”
I thought the mountains were obstruction enough.
We also had a Professional
Hypochondriac in that office.
She was always getting “sick”, usually with imaginary ills, and
the company paid her for it.
She even had her own copy of the
Physician’ Desk Reference, in the days before
WebMD, so she could
look up symptoms to match her imaginary diagnoses.
And yes, I did play around from time to time with a mental “situation
comedy” based on our gleefully dysfunctional little “work” group.
When I wasn’t actually working.
In the meantime, turn off that fountain.
Stop watering the lawn.
Take shorter showers.
And everybody pray for rain and lots of snow in the mountains.
Again.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |