It’s a privacy thing and not a secrecy thing. I really do like the privacy of blogging more or less anonymously.
My extraverted friends have a hard time understanding how intensely private I am, even though one-on-one in personal conversations, I can be very open and vulnerable. I like being able to share my heart personally and face-to-face. But that sort of limits the amount of feedback and dialogue that can happen. Blogging has been a nice way to find my voice in a way that allows me some privacy, but also lets me talk to more people and have my thinking challenged and interacted with in ways that are not threatening and don’t require as much ability to “think on my feet” as real-time, face to face conversations do.
Sometimes I process quite slowly, but it is hard in verbal conversations to recognize the need for space and time to process before answering. When I’m reading someone’s writing, though, I find I can back up and think about it for a few weeks and let it become a part of my internal dialogue before I respond (if I ever do). At the same time, if I have a response right away, I am free to do that as well.
Well all that is a preamble to saying, although I blog anonymously, I really don’t feel a need to hide everything about who I am in a secretive sort of way.
Yesterday I stumbled on the weather pixie, which is now in my sidebar. I like it because the picture sort of looks like me, except that I wear glasses, my nose is bigger and I’m a little shorter (actually, I’m quite tall, but since the pixie’s head is halfway up the moon, I can for once say, “I’m short, in comparison to her!”). So, if you’re the kind of person who needs a face to go with the person you’re talking to, I hope this picture helps 
The one or two of you who have actually met me in person can feel free to disagree about the resemblance, but for now, I think it’s pretty good for a cartoon.
Just in case you wondered, the big number on the weather pixie graphic is not altitude. There’s no place in Florida that high. Did you know that Florida has the lowest high point of any state in the US? That number is pressure, measured in hPa, a measurement I’m not familiar with.
I also like that the weather pixie gives the temperature in Celsius. I’m trying to be more aware of stating measurements in metric alongside of the American default system. I’m getting a better feel for approximate temperate equivalents as I watch the degrees go up and down in Celsius (although I wish they’d start going back UP–we’re having another cold snap here).
The temperature readings seem to be updated every couple of hours and are taken from an airport relatively nearby (in the same county).
One final story in this totally random post. When I was in 3rd grade, I vividly recall the day (!) we spent studying metric. I remember a vague sense of fear (although I don’t remember the exact words the teacher said that instilled that fear) that the universal metric system was all part of some socialist communist plot to make us like all the other countries in the world. I also remember (not surprisingly, given the fear factor) that the metric system seemed horrifically complex, difficult to understand and almost impossible to actually figure out.
When I was 18 and traveling in PNG, all of a sudden it dawned on me on day how amazing simple the metric system really is. How could I have ever thought 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 5280 feet to a mile, 16 ounces to a pound, etc. was SIMPLE? In hindsight, if there is any conspiracy or plot, surely it has something to do with keeping people thinking that a system like that is somehow better? than one where everything is broken down into 10s, 100s, 1000s.
I wonder if this contestant on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader would have done any better if she knew and could have answered in metric? I’m not sure it would have helped. My fifth grader was laughing so hard. Not that the fifth grader on the show got the answer right either, but at least she didn’t keep digging herself into a deeper hole like the adult contestant did!
I like the weather pixie. Does she put on a jacket when it gets cold? I have stories to tell about “Weather Boy” the little icon on our weather meter but that will save for another day…
I have seen a jacket on her, and she would definitely look more like me if she’d put on her winter coat when it gets down to 11 degrees celsius (52 degrees F) as she said it was last evening when I wrote this.
Oh, please do tell Weather Boy stories!
I’ve added a weather pixie to my family blog. Unfortunately temps here in Minnesota are supposed to plummet this week, with wind chills of -40*F on Saturday morning. Hope that boy has long johns to wear!
Thanks for the link to your family blog. Your little ones are so cute!
How do people actually walk out into that kind of weather and live?!?! Do your cars start (I can’t imagine that Florida cars OR their drivers would function at those temperatures.)? Do your windows break? Does your breath turn into icicles? Somewhere I read a joke about the different things that happen in different places at various temperatures. I think Minnesota was in there. Florida certainly was. 40* F (4.4 C) takes the breath out of me. I can only imagine what -40 would do! (Amazingly enough, -40 F is also -40 C. I thought the online converter wasn’t taking negative numbers, so I went and converted it with pen and paper, and lo and behold, it is correct after all!)
Well, the actual temp on Saturday will *only* be -5F or -10F, though it’ll feel much, much colder… we get some pretty strong winds coming out of Canada and there’s not much here to stop the airflow.
Yes, life goes on at those temps. I grew up in Alaska and it was not uncommon for parts in the middle of the state to reach -60F or lower (without the wind!). We had electrical plugs connected to the engine block to help with cold-morning starting, plus you put cardboard in front of the carb intake to block some of the coldest air from coming in. Haven’t had to use those tricks in MN yet.
I’ve played golf here down into the 30’s – if we shut down at 40 or 50, we’d need to start talking about hibernation!
Golf at 30? They canceled P.E. at my daughter’s school today, when it was in the low to mid 50s, because they said it was too cold for the student’s to be outside
I like the weather pixie. What a great sidebar.
I’ve lived in Florida and I know how cold it feels at 40 or 50.
It was single-digit cold in Iowa today and the car I share with my college-age daughter didn’t start. (I have owned cars with the electric block warmers, BTW, El Shaddai.)
She had to call her dad to get to work, and I took the city bus to my meetings and errands. I’ve been trying to become bus-savvy lately anyway. It was an adventure!
I was going to say that people who live in Florida should not talk about cold, but I see that El Shaddai (God?) beat me to it.
Incidentally, I remember some kind of a similar vibe when we were learning about the metric system. I think they were forcing the teachers to teach it when they didn’t really get it themselves so they were bitter and paranoid. That might account for my deeply embedded metric-panic. Thanks for chilling me out about it. (As if I needed chilling…I’m in Minnesota too!)
That’s funny, Terri, that you experienced similar things with metric being taught. I hadn’t thought about it from the teacher’s perspective before. What you said makes sense, though.
Yes, I know we are wimps here. But happy, warm wimps, usually.
ElShaddai, hibernation would be a definite backup plan for me. Migration would be my preferred option, though, at those temperatures.
Why DO people live in Minnesota? It must be an absolutely wonderful place and there must be some very good reasons and stories for why people live there, if so many people are willing to endure such bone chilling temperatures for so much of every year. What are the things that make it worth living with the cold?
People ask me the same sort of things about living in Florida. Don’t I miss the seasons? How do I live with hurricane fears? Why would I live in a place where the water tastes like it comes from a swamp? Why would anybody want to put up with bugs all year round?
There is probably never one answer, and the answers are probably a mix of practical reasons and preference. In any case, those reasons and stories are very interesting to me, so if you ever want to share them, feel free to do so here.
There’s only one reason to live in Minnesota: the cold weather kills all the big bugs. Period.
After 18 years growing up in Alaska, I ended up in Minnesota to go to college. Didn’t have a clue what to do after I graduated, so I moved to Minneapolis and started “life”.
I think it’s fair to say that the people are more attractive than the weather. Cold, windy winters and hot, humid summers with little transition in between, but everyone is pretty much even keeled, if not slightly passive-aggressive.
My wife and oldest son have some nasty allergies, so we may end up moving sometime, but I honestly don’t know where. A mountain peak in the Pacific NW would be very attractive to me, but I’m not sure the family would go for it.
I enjoyed your random post.
In addition to no hills, there are also no curvy roads in Florida. There was one in WPB that went around a lake and I loved driving it just because it had curves.
I lived in FL from 82-86; high school. I absolutely love Minnesota, though. The north shore is amazing, the city if full of parks, the downtown is thriving and the summers are perfect for swimming in the lake down the street. I’ve lived a lot of places (Wilmington, NC – Denver – Seattle – Chicago – Manhattan, KS – Warsaw, IN – Europe and Minneapolis is one of my all time favorite cities. (Seattle is #1, but my family is here.)
Tom, that link to the photo of the north shore is beautiful! And that’s funny how you missed curvy roads when you lived down here.
When you step out my front door, you can see our town’s lake, because the main down town streets all go straight out from the lake. So my dad and his brother were here recently for another brother’s 70th birthday. They go out my front door and see the lake and decided to walk there and back. Only, because it is so flat and straight, it looks like it’s “just down the road”. In reality, it’s 17 blocks away. They were a bit sweaty and out of breath when they returned.
El-Shaddai, I like even keeled people. If I had to live in a cold place, I’d rather do so in a place with a laid back feel rather than high strung. Isn’t it amazing how different cities have different feels and personalities? Even with so many different people and personalities, it’s interesting that there are general types of traits which seem to be quite common in an area. That’s another part of demographics, which is highly interesting to me. Never having traveled to the midwest, I have an empty mental map for the feel of cities out there, so it’s nice to be able to fill in some of the gaps.
Terri, natural (non toxic, chemical free) bug extermination would certainly be a big bonus to living with the cold, I agree.
Hey, here’s a way funnier clip from that show: scary stuff!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0
I agree. It’s scary, but hilarious!