One of the reasons I didn't stay in CA was the weather. There wasn't any.

It was funny, because locals kept complaining about the dramatic and unpredictable weather. I was like "Um.... its foggy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon. In the winter it goes down to the 40s or so, and in the summer up to the 80s. Try sunny and warm t-shirt weather one week, and an ice storm with 3 feet of snow the next."

Without the structure of school, and without the seasons, one day drifted into the next and I couldn't keep track of time. So I moved.

It must be very annoying when power goes out and there isn't a huge wind or snow storm. I've never had that happen to me before, though I have had internet service go spotty for no apparent reason.

Seriously? You loose power on a weekly basis? I remember that happening here twice in a decade. And trust me, we have weather. Lot's of it.

Northern Mass (out of Boston) or Southern New Hampshire - lovely weather! Hot summers, beautiful fall, cold winters with lots of snow - each season in its turn, done right.

On a completely different note: here are two topics that may interest Amy's readers:

1. What do folks think about the answer from "Dear Prudence": call the police on a neighbor who leaves her sleeping infant alone to run to the store.

I found the answer shocking - to me, this falls clearly in the "mind your own d***ed business" category. But the comments were even more shocking. Can it be true that some places actually have laws making this illegal?

I have no specific memories whether or not we ever left our kids alone as infants, but I would bet on it. If not to go to the store, then certainly to go weed the garden.

2. How about being arrested because you refuse to give up your passwords? Note that the police make the usual "child pornography" plea, but I found no reference anywhere to them actually having evidence to that effect. Really, the question is: can the government demand that you surrender your passwords? Are the equivalent to the keys to your filing cabinet?

Or is that self-incrimination - information stored in your brain that you should not be forced to disclose. In Britain, by the way, silence can be used as circumstantial evidence of your guilt - this is a rather recent change to the law there.

Link to ...

Link to story about teen arrested for not giving up his password...

"It's like we live in a third world country, the way the lights go out whenever the sky gives the slightest tinkle."

I'm told in Manila, this happens fairly regularly, although the only time it happened when I was there was during a fairly minor typhoon, and our hotel had a backup generator. Los Angeles a third world country? Well, I've never been there, so I don't really know, but...

Some years ago, I had to make a couple of trips to Sierra Vista, Arizona. The trips were in July. Now, Sierra Vista is pretty high up, so daytime highs were only in the 90s, and, as they say, it was a dry heat. The locals were complaining, though, about how muggy it was. Forty percent humidity! Coming from Virginia, I can't say as I felt their pain.

Seriously? You loose power on a weekly basis?

No -- it just happened three times during rather light rainstorms here last week.

I live in New England, southern Connecticut, and you know what they say about the weather here: if you don't like it, wait a minute.

We've been really lucky lately, no hurricanes this season, or last season, or even the season before! The last really bad one we had was in 1985, when Gloria blew through town. We lost power for 4 or 5 days. But other than that, the only time we've lost power lately has been when someone crashed into a pole with a transformer on it. The UI (United Illuminating, our electric supplier) crew came out and we had power back in about 3 hours.

Watch, now that I've said that, we'll have a really shitty winter with a bunch of ice storms, and power outages lasting days.
Damn!

o.O

I don't see that there's anything to complain about, Amy. You get the whole package living in a sea of concrete on the edge of a coastal desert where all of your water is is imported, and an earthquake is going to kill a bunch of you sometime, maybe soon; the only question there is how many, and how quickly.

No wonder your fellow Californians deny being out of money as they vote in measure after expensive measure. The environment encourages systematic denial!

Gee, what could go wrong?

Ah....SoCalIstan....I miss you so. Actually, really, I do. I pine for the nice weather and real Mexican food, and In-N-Out. Then I go back to the OC every Christmas for time with the family, and after 6 days of sitting in traffic, I remember why I left.

I was shocked by the Dear Prudence letter, too. It's funny, because the other day I was at a friends' house, and we popped out while her 1-year-old was taking a nap to walk the 5-year-old to a pottery class a block away. I was a bit shocked by it, but we were only gone 2 minutes. It's not what I would do, but I wouldn't call the police on her! For goodness sake!

The question is should all bad judgements be illegal?

Yeah, I read that letter too, NicoleK. And I thought about all the times I walked down to the playground at the end of the street with my oldest while the youngest was sleeping. Alone, in her crib. The longest we stayed was maybe 20 minutes,because I had other things to do at home, but youner was always still asleep when we got back. She'd wake up when she heard her sister go in the room to have a "peek" at her to see if she was awake!

But in any case, I think calling the police, or even CPS, is a little extreme. And as far as the legal issue that one woman posted about, I know that here in CT it's illegal to leave kids under the age of 12 alone in a CAR for any length of time, but in your own home, when you're not gone longer than 15 minutes or so, and the child is asleep in a crib? Not anyone else's damned business, as Bradley13 said.

Christ. I wish people would stop calling CPS and the cops like they're some kind of household hints hotline.

The question I would ask before calling the police: Is this child better off in foster care than in this situation? If the answer is no, then MYOB.

I forget which state but in some you have to use booster seats up till age 12. I'm so glad that law wasn't around when I was 12... I'd already hit puberty and my hips would NOT have been comfy.

I think here in CT it goes by weight - once a child hits 60 lbs, no more car/booster seat. Which, yeah, my oldest would have been in 7th grade before she could've gotten rid of the booster seat!

It's like we live in a third world country

Let me know when "the power is off" becomes the rule, not the exception. Then you'll be living in a third world country.

It's going to get worse, Ms. Alkon. The situaton has deteriorated to a place where, even if the idiots in charge were banished to Purgatory, we couldn't build and repair the infrastructure fast enough to hold back the events of the next decade.

"One of the reasons I didn't stay in CA was the weather. There wasn't any."

One of the reasons I like Southern California is, despite high taxes, a rotting infrastructure and a criminal friendly justice system, the lack of nasty weather. In 1971 I won the national lottery and my Uncle Sam sent me on an all expense paid one year vacation to beautiful Southeast Asia. Over 90 inches of rain fell over the central Mekong Delta that year -- all of it centered wherever I happened to be at time.

Weather-wise, California is a paradise.

The other reasons I stay are my lovely wife and daughter (neither of which are ready to leave yet), a paid for house and, of course, In-N-Out Burgers.

Chances are good that the reason you have spotty power and no choice in internet is that your local/county/state government has cozy nepotism deals with the utilities in question in order to protect them from the competition. They have in effect given them a monopoly to keep the prices up and keep the competition out. Every new regulation and tax further cements this relationship for those who got the deal (it is kind of like being at the top in a Ponzi scheme). If you were living somewhere there was actually a more free market, you might find the service much better and much cheaper for darned near everything. Isabel

Maybe the power went out because there was a heat wave and everyone was blasting their AC? It sure was hot in the Bay Area and it might affect the power grid as far south as LA.

But of course, making homes energy efficient is SOCIALIST and investing in self-generated power is worse than OBAMACARE, and asking people to conserve energy is GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE. After all we've got the God-given (oh sorry atheists, the Natural-given) right to waste all the energy we want. As long as we pay our own health care bills.

Jumping topics, Amy why don't you comment on the spate of news stories about teen suicides from bullying? Didn't you suffer from this? I sure did, and while I never thought of killing myself I wonder, is it really any worse today than 20 yrs ago? Why don't parents pull their kids out of schools that are a constant torment? Or do you think those teens are just weak and lazy for giving in to depression and despair?

I don't think I could live without winter. I'm out there when its 35 below with the cross-country skis on and my two girls (yellow lab and pomeranian mix) right next to me, running while I ski. And, just in case anyone thinks that's animal cruelty, you should know that I have a hard time keeping them indoors, even at those temps in the winter. Their pads thicken up at the beginning of the season and then, of course, they just love snow.

We have power outages here faily regularly, and it's usually due to rain too. I think they're becoming more of a regular occurrence all over, given the infrastructre everywhere is aging. However, if we get an outage in the winter, I can put the contents of the freezer out in the garage. It's usually colder than the freezer anyway.

...Amy why don't you comment on the spate of news stories about teen suicides from bullying?"

Wasn't this enough?

> Gee, what could go wrong?

Aren't you the guy who lives in Hurricane Alley?

> In 1971 I won the national lottery and my
> Uncle Sam sent me on an all expense paid
> one year vacation to beautiful
> Southeast Asia.

It amazes me how some guys can joke about it now. Twenty years ago I as working in a union shop in Hollywood, and the steward was a hardass ex-marine who'd seen some shit over there. When Clinton was elected, I asked whether he was resentful that a dodger had taken the big chair, and he said not really... Because people change their ideas about stuff. He specifically mentioned how someone in his life once cared a lot for pro football but had since lost interest. And I was all like "Yeah, but...."

I was born in one of the golden years (DOBs circa '59-'64) and never even had to register for the draft. Seriously, if any of you guys are building a time machine and you want to go back and start in a place where a lot of things will go right for several decades in a row, that's a good temporal zone to start in. If you can select male Caucasian American mid-westerner, that will help, too.

Thanks, Rad. I forgot about that.

"Aren't you the guy who lives in Hurricane Alley?"

Nope. Used to, not any more. And personally, I didn't actually find hurricanes a problem, having lived in Florida on the East Coast in the '60s and '70s. Modern construction and overcrowding of barrier islands is a problem today, along with that sea of people knowing zip point nada how to cope with anything.

LA wouldn't have a problem if they didn't have to import everything in huge amounts. Bust that up with an earthquake (hurricanes don't bust aquaducts, gas pipelines and the like) and they're done.

In 2004, Florida was out of gasoline in 24 hours the week before Labor Day, because everyone decided they had to rush around. (That's a sign, people.) California's not the only place at risk, but Florida's woes won't make Cali's go away, of course.

Oh, BTW: of course, you still had to register with Selective Service; the deal is that they never activated it.

"Aren't you the guy who lives in Hurricane Alley?"
I've always chuckled at the, "I don't understand how you can live in CA with those earthquakes?!?" people. The are natural/weather issues pretty much everywhere. If it's not quakes, there are hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, hell... I seem to recall a volcano erupting in Oregon when I was a kid. :/

Err... Washington vs Oregon up there. Oops

Crid, I'm one of those draft-gap babies too. Sometimes I wish I'd been born around 1940, so I could have worked on the space program in the '60s -- my dad did and from what he's told me, it rocked. Then again, the '70s sucked for those guys, so I'm glad I missed that bit.

vi, the bit you're forgetting is that the homes and the AC are a hell of a lot more efficient now than they were three or four decades ago. They why the Obama/weatherstripping thing is such a joke; in SoCal, improving your attic insulation from R-40 to R-60 would probably not pay for itself in the lifetime of the house. We're not "running out of electricity". What's happened is that enviro regs and NIMBY politics have made it impossible for electric utilities to build new transmission capability, or even improve what it has. I live in a part of the country that sees a lot more heat than SoCal ever does, and we don't have the kind of power problems that California does because politics here is reasonable about allowing utilities to add transmission capability when it's needed.

I'm not disputing that there can be an awful lot of fascist cozyness between utility execs and regulators. But it takes two to tango, and if sucking up to the government is what you have to do in order to keep the system operating, then that's what you have to do.

"vi, the bit you're forgetting is that the homes and the AC are a hell of a lot more efficient now than they were three or four decades ago."

But: Check the power bill for an old airy home built in the early 1900s, and check their placement. Near Orlando, you can see stick houses ten feet from each other where the heat and humidity require A/C 12 months of the year.

And an apartment or condo building is far more efficient still. It's a surface area/volume law of physics.

Unfortunately, in nearly all cases, people go for the immediate savings and buy bad designs.