According to my calendar, Christmas is 85 days away. Yet last night I heard Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” on a local radio station. I am sure it was some cheesy disc jockey’s ploy to be the first to play a holiday tune.

The upbeat Lee song left me feeling blue. These aren’t the holiday blues. These are the “summer was lousy and followed a horrible winter and I don’t want winter back again” blues.

Our bad weather started in early September of 2008, when rain poured down on Chicago, amassing a record number of inches and flooding basements (mine included). The rain was followed all too quickly by a cold snap and snow. That snow was joined by more snow and more snow as the winter progressed.

We had a brief warm spell around Christmas which resulted in frozen roads everywhere. This wasn’t just slick pavement. This was literally a sheet of ice over every street (whether a one-lane country road or a major highway). I was stuck at my sister’s house for two days, waiting for the icy streets to become drivable.

All winter I kept saying that as bad as it was, we really needed a good summer to balance things. That never happened. We had the least sunny summer since 1992.

Now here it is, the end of September, and it was 40 yesterday. This doesn’t bode well for the winter.

I guess all I can do is put on a sweatshirt and deal with it. Well, that and find that DJ and give him a big lump of coal upside his head.

– John Wroblewski, distribution specialist

I’ve always believed time is a necessary concept, but a strange one at best. Time is determinate depending on whether we are stressed or relaxed. If we are on deadline: stress; but on the first day of vacation we often say we have plenty of time.

The first time I realized that time was all relative was in high school. I was on tour with the Long Island Youth Orchestra and giving a concert in Western Samoa. We were staying with local families in their homes, and before we left the group, the conductor urgently stressed that we be on time for rehearsal the next day, “be on New York time.” I didn’t know what that meant until the next day when our host “dad” got us ready and drove us around the beautiful island on the way to rehearsal. Being semi-conscientious kids, not wanting to be scolded upon arriving late, we urged our host to cut the gorgeous detour short and go to rehearsal. He said, “Don’t worry, relax; you’re on island time now!”

I’ve also been awed at our own bodies when it comes to the concept of time and how we know when it’s time to do certain things in the morning, like get up, for example, without an alarm clock. This morning, however, it was the reverse; my body knew it was definitely NOT time to get up. Now, I’m sure all of you have stories similar to mine this morning.

I had to get up for a 7 a.m. flight and set my alarm for 4:45 a.m. When my alarm went off I got up, begrudgingly, brushed my teeth and did the whole morning routine feeling even more tired than I knew I should have. I went about my business and looked at a clock in a different room. It said 3:00 a.m. I looked again; yep, still 3 a.m. Somehow when I set my alarm I must have changed the clock settings as well. My body knew it was not yet time to get up, even at that hour. Happily, I went back to bed, but had to laugh at myself for making a silly mistake, but I was even more happy that I didn’t show up at the airport two hours early!

– Alex Young, vice president and associate publisher 

While playing the Twin Warriors Golf Course in Albuquerque, NM last weekend, I was lucky enough to let my curiosity get the best of me; and I gazed up at a passing plane which was flying over the fifth hole green. I heard the aircraft, as it was a little noisier than normal; this was because of the altitude. Upon closer look, it was a Boeing 747. I was sure the Albuquerque Airport had no such service. But much to my surprise, piggy-backing on the Boeing was the shuttle Discovery.

This was an amazing sight and one I pointed out to my fellow golfers. The shuttle Discovery had landed at Andrews Air Force Base on 9/11 due to weather, and it was being ferried back to the Kennedy Space Center. They turned this puppy around quickly, as this was seen on 9/20 over Albuquerque.

The modified 747 had to fly at lower altitudes than usual to maintain the pressure and temperature for fear of damage to the shuttle’s electrical systems. Since it flew at lower altitudes, the 747 burned more fuel, due to greater friction from a denser atmosphere. This, coupled with the shape of the shuttle on the back of the Boeing, meant more drag and more fuel burn.

The plane had to make several refueling stops on the way, and a scout plane flew ahead and reported on the weather. All this cost just $1 million — seems reasonable to me! It was certainly a great sight to see on a beautiful, clear day in Albuquerque.

– Fran Gallagher, publisher and CEO

The wildfires which threatened our valley earlier this week (see yesterday’s blog) led me once again to perform a mental exercise which I revisit whenever such an emergency makes the news. The phrase “evacuation notice” in alerts or radio reports, even if it is not directed at my immediate neighborhood, gets the wheels turning in my head. If I truly only had half an hour to gather myself, my loved ones and my valuables before leaving my home with the possibility that it and everything in it would be gone when I returned, what would I choose to take with me?

Such thoughts never entered my mind until we were living in the Puget Sound area and we experienced a few moderate earthquakes. These weren’t anything close to “the Big One” which geologists say could strike the region at any time (as ones have in the past), but they were large enough to spark efforts by emergency planners, school officials and the like to encourage individuals and families to prepare for large-scale disasters when outside help would be unavailable for days and disruptions in basic services could be expected. We were encouraged to develop communication plans, escape routes and stores of food and water and other supplies, and pull together and safely store important documents and the like. Our family, spurred on by the girls and the messages they were getting at school, did have a few discussions about where we would go and what we would do in a few different scenarios, but I will admit that we didn’t go the full route of having bins of supplies and gallons of water stored away.

About eight years ago, when we moved to the dry side of the Cascade Mountains and into wildfire territory, I had cause to ponder more often what I might do under threat of an emergency evacuation. Virtually every summer there were multi-thousand-acre fires that burned through forest-, range- and croplands in our region, often putting hundreds of homeowners under mandatory evacuation orders to clear out until the danger was past. A Level Three alert (”Ready”) meant fire could reach your property and you should make plans to get out. Level Two (”Set”) equated to “load your vehicles and prepare to leave,” and Level One (”Go”) was an immediate order to get out — no ifs, ands or buts. One could exist under levels two or three for several days, depending on winds, humidity and temperature, giving time to transport livestock out of the area and pull things together. Then again, the levels could shift rapidly or jump immediately to mandatory evacuation.

While our home was in the midst of a well-established development in East Wenatchee, nevertheless it sat just down slope from dryland wheatfields and sagebrush and scrublands — always very dry after our long, hot summer days. Twice in the six years we lived there fires burned through those areas, turning the sky a glowing, threatening orange at night. Luckily, the winds pushed the flames east from us, but those were tense days as we watched helicopters sweep low over our home to fill their tanks with water from the Columbia River to the west and then return to drop their loads a mile or two away. Everyone was on alert; we listened to forecasts intently and observed every tiny shift of wind. I know I wasn’t alone in filling my head with lists of what I would grab and throw in the car if we were put under notice to evacuate. Photo albums, Christmas ornaments made by the girls or gathered on our travels, jewelry, the computer, file drawers of papers and documents, family heirlooms or special treasures from abroad . . . all of these filled my head and vied for space as I mentally filled my minivan (with scarcely a thought for clothes or toiletries).

How about you? Ever thought about what you would grab if you had only a short time before leaving your worldly goods behind or, God forbid, actually ever had to make such choices? If you could, what would you save?

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader 

This week as our high temperatures have hovered around 100 and it’s been weeks (well, more like months) since we’ve had measurable precipitation, I’ve watched the news stories of the torrential rains and flooding in the South. My friends on the East Coast and my daughters in Chicago have bemoaned the fact that it seems as if summer hardly visited them this year, and I’ve thought more than once that it would be nice if we could somehow stir the weather up a bit and give them a little of our heat while we got some cooler, damper days. 

For most of us, unpleasant weather — whether too cold, hot, wet or dry — is merely cause for small talk or minor inconveniences, but as we’ve seen this week, it can be cause for severe economic loss and death. Too little rain and farmers lose crops to drought; too much, and they see those crops swept away or rotting in the fields. Either way, production costs go up and income drops. Transportation and shipping face delays and expensive interruptions, and damage is visited upon infrastructure. In the case of wildfires, such as those Southern California has been battling for nearly a month now, the cost of fighting those fires must be added to the losses of homes, businesses, crops and forests. The human loss, greatest of all, comes to those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and those who seek to protect the rest of us from the fires, floods and winds; and those who experience the loss of their homes and sense of security.

All of that came a little closer to home for me this week as we saw not one but two large wildfires in the Rogue Valley this Monday, one at the edge of Ashland and one only three miles from my home here on the east side of Medford. Firefighters, facing 100-degree temperatures and 30-mile-an-hour winds, had barely begun to get a handle on the Ashland fire when a fast-moving blaze sprung up on a hillside adjoining several housing developments in Medford. With the airport between my home and the towering pillar of smoke across the valley, I watched throughout the afternoon as four airtankers repeatedly landed to refill with fire retardant and immediately took off to drop their loads. While I knew our home was in no immediate danger, even as ash and charred oak leaves drifted into my backyard, I couldn’t help but feel dread and anxiety for those who lived on that hillside and those fighting the flames and wind. And knowing how quickly that fire sprung up, I also knew it could just as easily happen in the field across the street from my home.

Happily, in this case, no homes were lost and no one was injured in the 600-plus-acre fire that scorched that Medford hill, and it was contained by the next day. Over the last three days, though, we’ve sat under a pall of smoke from two fires burning in forest lands several miles north of here. With the heat expected to continue into next week, no rain in sight and everything as dry as tinder, we know we aren’t out from under the threat of more fires yet. We wait and watch and hope for cool, fall weather and a good drenching rain.

–Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader