The Washington Post reports that it has been 722 days since the DC area had snowfall greater than 1 inch. Global warming continued to be our friend, as this weekend Snow Thingie Nemo blasted New England with a few feet of snow and we got bupkus. Since I 'm currently dealing with a torn rotator cuff, no tears for lack of snow here.
Lack of snow, of course, is bad for ski slopes and body work shops but good for hiking. Carl and I revisited Sugarloaf Mountain on Sunday, doing a wussified variation of our usual 6 mile loop that avoided two of the three peaks and instead traversed a streamside trail between those peaks. The heavy rains of last week left lots of evidence of strong runoff and lots of crunchy mud to plod across. The beautiful blue sky counterbalanced Carl's grumbling about building a software defined radio kit that had numerous eensy beensy surface mount devices that needed to be soldered onto a circuit board.
I saw Carl's whining, and raised it with my own complaining about the garage door opener I installed almost 10 years ago having problems hearing the remotes. After changing batteries and replacing remotes I decided it had to be the receiver logic board. As soon as Amazon emailed me that my credit card had been charged and the new board was on the way, all remotes started working again. I am sure this was either: (1) CIA mind rays at work; (2) the new smart meters causing interference; or (3) solar flares. I'm leaning towards (1), as I noticed there have been many "Comcast" white vans working in the neighborhood recently - as if Comcast ever actually had repair crews out...
Since the Sugarloaf hike was not all that challenging, later that afternoon Carole and went out and checked out the paths around Font Hill Park. I drive by there a lot and it always looked inviting. Only about 1 mile of paths, but the County claims there are 53 species of dragonflies and 7 species of amphibians (who I guess have a very varied dragonfly diet, since Font Hill appears to be the Baskin Robbins of dragonflies.) All we saw was the ubiquitous Asian walking couples which can be found bundled up and carrying walking sticks in pretty much every park on every weekend.
When we got home, Lauren had decided to grace us with a visit, grumbling that we didn't wait for her to use the Safeway points to gas up the cars but as usual brightening up the house in her unique Lauren kind of way.
Any weekend where the driveway and sidewalks don't need to be shoveled and the garage door fixes itself, and where you can gas up your car without having to pay for your daughter's gas is a good weekend.
John's work blog is here.
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