Silly Californians :)

I was picking up some prospective students at the airport yesterday who happened to be from California. Like any good Oregonian, I am rightly suspicious of Californians, but I was trying to be cordial. It just happened to be snowing in Kalamazoo, not too unexpected for February, and so their plane was delayed several hours. When they finally did arrive (after I had carefully attempted to understand the deeper meanings in my spanish readings, read every sentance in the visitor's guide to Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, as well as browsed through all the housing lisitngs in the county) the looks on their faces made it clear that something was horribly wrong. They had never seen snow. Now, I am sure they had seen snow in movies and maybe read about it in a book, but these girls had never actually experienced the thrill of knowing you will never stop before the intersection because you are on ice, or the embarassment associated with painfully falling down a flight of stairs because you slipped. To me, snow is equivalent to winter, there is really no separating them, so it was incomprehensable to me that someone could never have seen snow. I was supposed to just drop them off at the student center where they would meet their host, but one of their hosts never showed up. I didn't really know what else to do except to invite her to stay with me instead. I normally love hosting prospectives, but given my incredible ability to procrastinate, I was not prepared to spend the evening showing someone around the college. I decided, however, to forget about my homework and let her experience snow. Needless to say, we spent most of the night outside. It is amazing to witness somone's first experience sledding, or building a snowman, or starting a snowball fight. I think she ended up having a good time, at least.
As a result, I was up at 5am this morning to study for my ethology exam. The exam ended up going pretty well (I hope) but by the time I got to work, I had been up for almost 12 hours and it just felt like a really long day. I alsways feel like arriving at work is like the start of a new day. Then coming home from work is like the start of a third day, since I do homework for hours on end. *sigh* It can be tough fitting three days into one.
Random fact for the day: look at the cool graph showing the planet breathing (the up and down of the CO2--more CO2 in the winter because all the green plants in the Northern Hemisphere are no longer photosynthesizing) and clear evidence for an increase in CO2 over time. There is another version of this graph that superimposes global temperatures, showing an interesting correlation that suggests global warming.