Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 127

Weather

We're having a pretty impressive winter storm: a lot of wet, heavy snow and rising winds this evening. It took me two hours to get home from work. The trip is usually an hour.

The plows are out. I watched five guys -- three white businessmen and two black working guys -- push a stuck car in downtown Minneapolis. Winter used to bring us together in Minneapolis: we pushed each other's cars and helped each other dig out. The winters have been too mild lately to encourage cooperation. It feels good w

Bill Holm

Bill Holm, the wonderful Icelandic-Minnesotan poet and essayist, died yesterday. I knew him slightly through my friend John Rezmerski, who had been friends with Bill since graduate school. It's hard to describe Bill. Garrison Keillor did pretty well. This is what Keillor wrote:

Bill Holm was a great man and unlike most great men he really looked like one. Six-foot-eight, big frame, and a big white beard and a shock of white hair, a booming voice, so he loomed over you like a prophet and a preache

Where Have I Been?

I haven't posted for over a month and am wondering why. My current excuse is pneumonia, which I've had since the first week of February. I don't know how much longer I had it, since it was mostly asymptomatic. I had a backache and then a fever and went on-line to read about backaches. Backache and fever is not a good combination, so I went to the doc.

I'm on my second set of antibiotics. It's way down in my right lung, and Patrick says it's hard to treat when it's burrowed in so deep.

There is a

Yet another weather report

Friday was bright and clear and 20 below with a windchill of 40 below. It began to warm overnight. This morning it was 17 above and snowing. Patrick and I went to the Mall of America to do some mall walking. He is feeling a bit sick, maybe in response to his flu shot, so we walked slowly and did not do the full mile and a half tour.

After we got back home, I loaded some fiction in the little Acer netbook computer which Pat is loaning me; and I am currently at the local coffee house happily tappi

That's It

I am going to switch to other topics. This blog is supposed to be about science fiction and bird watching.

More...

I was going to stop posting about Gaza, but I got a comment on one of my prevous posts saying that Israel was perfectly willing to stop killing Palestinians, if only Palestinians would let Israel live in peace. I found the comment deeply offensive, because it cried many crocodile tears about the Palestinian kids who had to be killed, because of Hamas. It's Israeli bombs that are killing the kids, dropped into a crowded refugee camp with no escape. Since the bombs have hit schools, hospitals and

Union Miracle

From the weblog Firedoglake:

They're calling it a miracle--the successful landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson and subsequent rescue of all 155 passengers. They're detailing the heroism of all involved, starting with the pilot and including cabin crew, ferry crews, and first responders. What they're not telling you is that just about every single one of these heros is a union member.

There's the pilot:

What might have been a catastrophe in New York — one that evoked the feel if not the scale

On a More Positive Note...

It snowed last night, and the high today is going to be 21, cold enough to keep the snow on the ground. More snow is predicted tonight, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The high Thursday is predicted to be -1. This is not bad, though I still miss the -20 days with a -50 or -60 windchill. As our former governor Rudy Perpich, who was an Iron Ranger from Up North, said, "It keeps the riffraff off the streets."

Betty McCullom and Keith Ellison, the congresspeople from the Twin Cities, did not vote for