Pointless oh geez I don't know of the day:

It's snowing. We may get twenty centimetres today. You just know that it's put me in a mood.

Also, my maybe-a-cold is now definitely-a-cold. Um, yay? Or, you know, not.

None of this has me at all in blather mode, naturally.

I will say, however, that there's been one thing that made me smile this week. The creeks are flooding. Should I explain?

I live in a city that has a river and two small creeks flowing through it. Normally they depress me a little. Not because I have anything against flowing water; it's because I wish they flowed more. Unfortunately, one of the things I've learned while doing historical research for programs at our sister site is how much and how quickly we've managed to completely emasculate our rivers and streams. There's been settlement here for less than a hundred and fifty years, and in that time we've managed to take our riparian habitats from yearly, scouring ice jams and challenging floods (which, while they might be challenging to us, are very important to the maintenance of the ecosystem) to, in the case of the creeks, barely a trickle for most of the year. It's sad, really.

Every once in a while, though, if conditions in the spring are just right, the creeks decide to remind us just what the creeks are capable of being. And it's fantastic. It's fantastic to see the natural cleansing of the courses, and since it's mostly parkland that gets flooded when it happens, there's not really much to the human cost side of the event.

And dammit, even if there was a human cost side of things, I still find it impressive to see what water can do. I know that there are plenty of people out there who are currently dealing with very serious flooding who would very emphatically disagree with me (and fair enough, if you're in danger of losing your home or, knock wood, your life), but there have been a couple of times in my life when I've been involved in dealing with floods (once, very memorably, when I ended up being the default person in charge at work and had to try to coordinate the preparations) and I have to say that even when I was worried that things might be wiped out or at the very least damaged I still had to respect the sheer power of the water.

Ok, maybe I am a little weird. But nature fascinates me even when (especially when) it's not all fluffy bunnies and bambi.

Or bandaid, which is what I first typed.

Shows what's on my mind, I guess. Would anyone out there like a Hole In Shoulder update, since I've made the accidental aside? Things are healing up decently, which is why I haven't been mentioning it lately, but my skin is becoming absolutely and completely ratched by the weeks of wearing bandages. You never know how much NOT fun bandages can be until you have to put them on every damned day after every damned day. Hopefully not much longer now, though.




Um. I've completely distracted myself now. Ah well, time to get back to work anyway, I suppose.

And try not to pout too much at all the brand new white stuff out there.