It's a small world

This beautiful sunny morning in Bellingham began with me meeting the Fairhaven walkers for a nice brisk (almost chilly) six-mile trek through the Western Washington University campus. Then I headed over to the Farmers' Market to pick up some vegetables, and these flowers just took my breath away. You can see some veggies on the periphery of this picture, which I also checked out. My favorite vendor, Rabbit Field Farms, already had a dozen people lined up waiting for the bell to ring so they could purchase their own bounty for the week.

Aren't vegetables beautiful in their amazing variety? I bought some collards and kale and brought the goods home to Smart Guy, who has already steamed them up and put them in the fridge in separate containers, with my greens a little bit more done than his. We'll each take a bit when piling up our plates with the rest of our dinner and stick them in the 'wave to reheat. They don't last long, since they are so tasty I often have them twice a day, for lunch AND dinner, until they're gone and we start over again.

From Climate Prediction Center

Then I got on the Internet to read the news of the day. The Climate Prediction Center just put out a new set of probability maps covering the next two weeks. This one shows that the heat in the east will continue (maybe not quite as hot, let's hope), while we in the Pacific Northwest will remain below normal, temperature wise. However, it's a relative thing: now that the sun is shining and the rain has stopped, I'm certainly not minding the temperatures heading upwards of 70 degrees F (20 C). Right now, at almost 2:00 pm on Saturday, it's 71 out there, making me feel like we're in the middle of a heat wave. But of course we're not: it is not even cooling down at night over most of the country to our daily high temperatures.

And then there's Norway. I read about the perpetrator of all of yesterday's violence in Oslo and at the youth camp on the island of Utoya. Apparently the SWAT Team had difficulty reaching the island, and the gunman mowed down child after child for one and a half hours. I was chilled to the bone when I read about it on KOMO News here. The world is such a small place now; I felt their pain and cried for their parents and the surviving students. Norway is a place with so little gun violence that most police don't even carry weapons. Somehow I think all that might change after this.

Nobody knows his motivation. Is it just me or is the world beginning to come apart at the seams? Although twenty or thirty years ago, days would go by before all the details would be available to the rest of the world. Now, something that happens in Oslo is front page news on my news reader. People are sending each other messages on Twitter which race around the world in less time that it takes for me to catch my breath. My Facebook friends will be sending me to pictures and links that they think relevant.

So maybe it's not coming apart but coming together at the speed of light. Maybe because of the Internet we are more connected than ever, and that is the change I feel. Right now I grieve and am unwilling to read any more news, for fear of becoming overwhelmed by it all and allowing hopelessness to have the upper hand. On a beautiful sunny day, at that.
:-{