My obligation

It seems that with all the flooding in Wisconsin and Iowa and the fact that I'm closely connected to both places AND have a MS in Water Resources Management I should feel obligated to say something about them, right? Right. Well, here goes...

I cringe every time I hear the flooding called a "natural disaster" because I don't really think it is. I'm glad others agree. I figured shortly after the flooding started to go down the media would start to pick up on this, and they did. I even prompted my father in law (a newspaper editor in an Iowa Mississippi River town) to look into this a few days back, with an emphasis on the climate change angle. I guess he got "scooped" by the WaPo...

Sure, some of the flooding is due to lots of heavy rains. But I think that the man-made changes - land use and climate change - play a significant role, and it's the land use decisions, especially the decision to build in flood plains, that drive up the cost of the devastation. Should my tax dollars fund the clean up effort in communities that have made poor decisions? Well, a heck of a lot more of my tax dollars are funding another poor decision - the Iraq war - so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Where do you stand?

Are you more like Gandhi, Stalin, George Bush or Milton Friedman? There's all sorts of questionnaires out there to find out where on the political/economic spectrum you are but I found this to be far better than most. Check it out here and then compare your results to mine.

Green greens

Some evidence points to interest in golf waning. I've played golf once and found it enjoyable enough, but wouldn't make playing it a habit. With the US Open being played in the desert this weekend this post seems apropos today.

Speaking of green, all the rain around here is making things really green. And pretty soon as all the nitrogen from farm fields in the midwest makes it to the Gulf of Mexico, that's going to be looking pretty green, too.

Has it really been that long?

Okay, posting two posts in a row, separated by months, that both apologize for not posting in a while is hardly a good way to win a fan base. My June 10th resolution, however, is to post on a daily basis for a while.

What will I post about? I don't know. Probably just some links to interesting things I read.

To start out I'll hype Mother Jones' recent issue on our nation's energy woes. I particularly like this article on the myths of energy independence. I don't think there's a politician out there willing to actually speak the truth about the impossibility of energy independence. (Reading this article is like reading the Cliff's Notes to a book I read recently called Gusher of Lies by Robert Bryce.) While MoJo is certainly left-leaning in their content, they aren't afraid to piss off the lefties either, and I enjoy that... a lot... just like I enjoy John McCain's willingness to stick it to the right on many issues.

The first of April

I've been so lax recently. No posts in over a month! To my loyal readers, I apologize.

I always look forward to April 1. Why? Because there are so many mildly amusing (at best) or just plain stupid April Fools stories. For one day of the year, it seems like every website attempts to be like The Onion, with varying degrees of success. Just at the websites I frequent I found the following Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here. I find it amusing to read or hear comments by people who believe, however briefly, these stories. Someday I'll probably forget that it's April Fools and be one of those fools. Until then, I'll just laugh at them.

Moving on

Now that it's set in that we are leaving the friendly confines of Madison for the perhaps-friendlier confines of Dubuque many questions have come up.

Will we like Dubuque? Will it seem too small? Will it offer the opportunities we want for our family? Will Dubuque seem extremely conservative in comparison? If so, will that be good or bad? What will I miss most about Madison? Least? Will we have trouble finding like-minded people? Will we feel like we fit in better in Dubuque than Madison? Can we imagine staying in Dubuque forever? Will we ever figure out why Dubuquers back into parking spaces so much?

My predictions... we will both enjoy being in a much smaller town. We will find that people in Dubuque are, in general, friendlier. It will be weird at times because of past history in Dubuque. We will be driven crazy at times by the car-centered way of life in Dubuque. We will at times feel out of place because of some of our beliefs and thinking, but in some ways we will find that we fit in better. We will miss having so many great restaurant options (not that we took advantage of many of them in Madison). We will enjoy having a much better paper to read over breakfast. We will realize that "normal" in Madison is definitely not "normal" in many places outside of Madison. I will miss being so closely connected to state politics. I will be shocked at how few people get out and run or bike or ski everyday. We will actually take advantage of the opportunities that Dubuque offers in a way that we did not in Madison. We will enjoy being able to get across town so quickly. We will miss having so much selection in our grocery store. We will enjoy feeling a part of a small college community again. We will end up finding a small group of relatively like-minded people with kids and become close friends. We will stay a long time in Dubuque.

I think we are both very excited about moving to Dubuque. I think if you'd asked each of us 10 years ago if we could ever imagine ourselves saying that, I bet we both would have said "no." But we're older and more mature (wiser even, maybe?) and the pull of family connections and the scarcity of college teaching opportunities both were major factors in our thinking.

The time has come for us to move on. Now if we could just find somebody willing to buy our house.

I wish I could do that!