Month: August 2026

I spent my life through college graduation in the tropics, and I had never traveled to a snowy location.  However, I did grow up on the sunny beaches along the Atlantic Ocean, both in Puerto Rico and Florida.  I had a quiet fascination with snow, the white, fluffy solid water.  Our freezer grew frost that resembled hairy ice; that’s about the closest I got.  In Puerto Rico, we had a shaved ice treat called a piragua.  That certainly resembled snow, but maybe the quantity of a snowball.

My other fascination is the combination of snow and beaches.  The rational pre-engineer in me reasoned that beaches existed in locations cold enough to snow, and snow must at least occasionally accumulate there.  Therefore, there must be instances of waves crashing onto a shore while snow is visible.  This isn’t rocket science.  Why don’t we see pictures of it?  This thought crossed my mind before we all had access to the internet; I couldn’t get answers through a web search.

Continue reading “Seeing the snow on the beach” →

Like most middle school children, I took a physical education class.  On Mondays, we brought gym clothes and a towel for the showers, and on Fridays, we brought the clothes and towel home to wash them.  A requirement to pass the class was to verify that we showered before continuing to other classes.  We all needed to shower and walk to our teacher’s office off the locker room, wet and wearing a towel, then he would check us off a list on his bulletin board.

I found the practice a bit goofy.  We spent a class learning the rules of volleyball or softball, then spent a week playing those sports by the rules we had just learned.  While I understand that we don’t want students walking into the classes that followed dripping with sweat from PE, the practice of walking into our teacher’s office, soaking from the shower and wearing a towel, only to be checked off in a cryptic list was silly.  Still, I participated.

Continue reading “Keep the tip” →