Notes From A Bear's Journey

      After a rather mild start to winter, the snow arrived along with the cold.  Nothing unusual there, at least for much of the country where winter means snow.  But in my state, heavily dependent on ski tourism, the arrival of snow, at least enough snow to turn off the snow-making machines (at one point, it wasn't even cold enough for those water-guzzling sprayers to create "snow"), brought everyone a sigh of relief...that is, if you were a skier or snowboarder or snow-shoer.  And it IS our water in the spring, once it all melts, so that alone brought another sigh of relief after nearly 20 years of drought conditions.  All that aside, the arrival of a lot of snow in one or two storms meant that it was time to use those muscles so rarely used.  Yes, I have "the beast," a monster snowblower that laughs at even the deepest, slushiest snow and clears not only my driveway and sidewalk but that of several neighbors as well (one is quite elderly and the others are p

      There are a lot of us mucking about on this planet, over 8 billion at  last count .  Just attempting to count to eight billion would take well over half a century, 761 years by one estimate .  And yet, even with so many of us crammed together in cities and often tied up in traffic, there still seems to be a lot of space left on this planet.  A quick drive of a few hours most anywhere will find you facing farmland or rocky cliffs or desert sands or rolling hills.  It all seems near-incomprehensible since our planet is considered one of the "smaller" ones in the grand scheme of things.  But that is just the land, the portion we can walk on, or drive on, or dig up.  That land, in reality, is what we consider our "real" and touchable home.  But that land is just 30% of our planet; the rest is water.  Phys.org broke it down this way:  96.5% of all the Earth's water is contained within the oceans as salt water, while the remaining 3.5% is freshwater lakes and f