Just a link to a fascinating analysis of why finding other human-habitable planets is Very Difficult Indeed.

Charlie’s Diary: How habitable is the Earth?.

And a neat picture of the History of the Earth, thanks to Wikipedia.

“Approaching Turkey, Santa will have to avoid the razor-sharp blue triangles of a cold front. Once through the front, though, he’ll find ideal conditions over Turkey and Eastern Europe, where cold temperatures and snowy rooftops abound.”

Thanks to Jeff Master’s WunderBlog

We got a lot of snow this weekend.

I left work around 1300 on Friday, just as the first flakes were falling. Because we did not plan ahead, the only snow shovel we owned was this one:

That was not a good thing, given that the French Toast Alert was at Orange:
Also, we were out of milk. So I joined the throngs at first Home Depot, then Costco, neither of which had shovels. (Costco had milk, though, so I won on that account.) I started to head home, dejected and shovel-less, when I saw the red siren-sign of CVS up ahead.

“It can’t hurt to check, right?”

The parking lot was crowded but had empty spaces, so I pulled in. They were doing brisk business with people stocking up on cold medicines and toiletries, but what to my wondering eyes should appear but two boxes of big plastic snow shovels and a palate of ice-melt! I grabbed two shovels, picking ones that were not already cracked, and a bit more ice-melt for the walkway, and headed home before the roads got worse than they already were. [caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”I got two shovels similar to this one”][/caption]

From the kitchen window, it looked like a scene from a Christmas card, so I set up my new work-laptop (arrived Wednesday—just in time!) and got back to work looking out at the snow gently blanketing the back yard. The amazing part, to me, was that this scene didn’t change much—the snow piled higher, but it just kept falling. Brian laughed at me, because every time I passed a window I’d exclaim, “It’s still snowing!”. I just could not believe the snow would keep falling this long. I started to believe mid-day Saturday, and by Sunday morning when we tried to shovel out to get to church (we eventually decided that the roads weren’t safe) I was no longer quite as amused by the still-falling snow. I was, however, grateful that we bought two shovels.

By the way, snow is heavy. And there was a lot of it.

The snow stopped sometime shortly after dark last night, but we didn’t go out and shovel again immediately. We went out this morning at 7, and it took us about 90 minutes each to clear the walk and to free the two cars from the driveway. I really really really hope the wind doesn’t blow it all back onto the driveway again…