It’s Raining – Set the Voices Free

Whether you realize it or not, this is your lucky day. We know what Dan was working on. It wasn’t that good, but he was gonna smush it around and stick It out here anyway. We didn’t want to let that happen, but he hasn’t been letting us out much lately.

Too busy for the voices in your head, huh? Too many serious events, important meetings, phone calls and junk like that? Well, we knew Linda would rescue us. Her prompt for today is like a get out of jail free card. Mental jail that is.

“Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “whether/weather.” Use one, use both, use them any way you’d like. Bonus points if you start and end your post with one (or each) of them. Enjoy!“

We’re going to snag those bonus points, too. We started with ‘whether’ and we’ll end with the other one. We didn’t want to start with the weather cause the weather around here has been crappy lately. Or is that ‘crispy’? The iPhone flagged ‘crappy’ and suggested ‘crispy’ instead. Those two words are not interchangeable. We’d go into graphic detail, but we might just lose our lease on this blog post for that.

The weather this year seems like it’s trying to be anti-weather. Like it’s opposite weather day. We had 70°f (21.1°c) days in February, and 40°f (4.4°c) in May. Did you notice how nice that Fahrenheit/Celsius thing looks? That’s courtesy of the NF Utility page. We’re still working on the Metric to English version of that utility, but that’s turning out to be trickier.

The really cool thing about the Metric system is the whole powers of 10 thing. You know, orders of magnitude and all that. 10, 100, 1,000, etc. makes for easy math. 16 ounces to a pound, 12 inches to a foot, three feet to a yard, 5,280 feet to a mile. Five thousand two hundred and eighty? Who the heck came up with that? Actually, we know this. A mile is 8 furlongs. A furlong? A furlong is the length of the furrow a team of oxen could plow in a day. That’s handy, isn’t it?

These aren’t easy things to work with.

See, computers don’t think like us. Actually, they don’t think at all. Well, there’s been some big advances in artificial intelligence, but you have to consider just two things to put that into perspective: 1) We measure intelligence as compared to human intelligence, and 2) Our collective human intelligence elected the crew in Washington that decided to stick with English measurement.

Anyway, take 3 meters as an example. That would be 30 centimeters, or 9.84252 feet. Nobody says “9.84252 feet” – Most Americans wouldn’t know how tall/long/far 9.84252 feet is any more than they’d know hard tall/long/far 3 meters is. We would say “nine feet, ten and one eighth inches” – that wouldn’t be exactly accurate, but at least we would understand, kinda. So, having a utility that converts 3 meters to 9.84252 feet is kinda useless. Where were we?

Oh yeah, the weather. The weather around here stinks. Whether you know it or not, you’re luckier reading about the metric crisp (that’s just to see if you’re paying attention). We will let the photos in the gallery give you an idea about the weather.

“Why didn’t the grounds crew roll out the tarps? We’re not going to be able to play here…”

Hartford on a gray day

Korean Dogwood – the upper leaves and blossoms are keeping these dry, for the moment.

Yep, that’s the pole I used for the #ilinerWed badge

As seen while out with Maddie for her morning duty

The rhododendrons are opening

The sun is trying its best

Sand Cherries. Maddie and I have to walk through these so she can check the perimeter

Wet rhododendrons

Yes! – Bonus Points – And, for the second time in a couple of weeks, you get to listen to Natalie Merchant, this time with 10,000 Maniacs.