Okay, I'm getting tired of complaining about the weather. Today it quit snowing and the sun came out for the first time in what seems like months. The only problem is that the high temperature in Stanford/Fort Logan was 20 degrees! At 9 0'clock PM the temperature is hovering at 4 degrees. Funny, tonight's low is supposed to 10 degrees.We went to Versailles this morning and the roads were passable ,but still treacherous. The good news is we have only one more week of January, but the Nocasters are gleefully talking about "The Next Wave" coming from the west. They're thinking by Monday that the storm will hit Atlanta and the South again. Don't you just hate it when Al Gore and the global warming is right? I think that it was more comforting when the citizens of the country could only look outside and figure what the weather was going to be. Times like this makes me think of Aruba , which has Last Summer, This Summer, and Next summer for its seasons.Some people might get bored with continual low-eighty degree temperatures, but not me.There is no need of weather forecasters in Aruba, But come to think of it what good are they to us? Cold days are good for catching up on drawing and the paperwork necessary for the business, and I really enjoy the creative process involved in drafting. Drafting itself is just about a lost art because of CAD, which is computer assisted drawing. I'm a dinosaur because I'm too old to draw on a computer, and obviously I can't type. Therefore I draw. I guess I have drawn a line from here to the moon in the last 33 years, and have used my electric eraser to obliterate half enough to return to earth. There's something comforting about sitting at my drawing table and getting back to basics. Part of the problem at times is being on the cell phone for extended periods. A typical cell conversation will last an hour or more and this just zaps the creative process. The most bizarre effect of Autocad is that companies have nearly stopped selling drafting supplies, and even erasers for the electric erasers are becoming increasingly difficult to buy. Drawing used to be done with big push button lead pointers, and had large lead that was sharpened in a mechanical devices that created beautiful , fragile points. THey had to be sharpened about every 4 or 5 minutes, and had to be the right hardness or they would smear on your vellum(paper). Autocad takes all that out of the equation. A plan drawn by autocad has no personality and is boring. You have to figure out the scale to take anything off the thing, and most of the time the scales are wrong or mislabelled. Someone told me the Cad developers are trying to make changes to the Cad to make the final drawings look more like hand drawn. Why?? Cad drawings are pieces of crap, mostly created by nerds at the direction of lazy architects and designers. Lazy creators create inferior products and often repeat their sorry designs. Cad operators only have to push a few keys to alter one building to the next. Creativity in the design and architectural field is dead in the USA. You have to go to Spain or even Brazil to find truly impressive designs. In the last few years the Administrative Office of Courts for the State of Kentucky has gone on a suicidal task of building new courthouses all over Kentucky. Our leaders have built huge , unbecoming behemoths in nearly every county seat of Kentucky. What these nearesighted spenders didn't comprehend is that all of Kentucky's jails and prisons are falling apart and vastly overcrowded to the point that criminals are given early release , or no sentence at all. It makes sense to sentence the criminals in palaces ,but have no place to incarcerate them. The AOC has gone into old towns and torn down classic old buildings to replace them with monstrosities of poor taste. In Monticello ,Kentucky they built this paragon of ugliness that blends the Adams Family Victorian Mansion with The Jetsons. What a waste of money!In nearby Lancaster the nimrods have created a grand curving brick front with 3 story fluted columns. Never mind that Lancaster has no jail at all, and the rest of the whole town is rapidly falling to ground in rot. There is not even a jail or grocery store in all of Lancaster, and yet they built this multi-million dollar judicial center. It has to make sense to someone, and I would like to know who. Lancaster is scheduled to be completely bypassed in the next five years by the widening of Highway 27. I think that it would be prudent to make a rule that there would be no judicial centers built if there were no grocery stores, and especially if there were no jails.But that would make too much sense in governmental thinking. I read today that New York is testing or trying to see if States can legally go bankrupt to not have to pay the ponderous debt loads that they have accrued. Now doesn't that make you feel comfortable for future services?? I think neighbor Crab Orchard has played with the idea of bankrupcy, and I don't know where this stands, but one thing I do know is that Highway 150 has bypassed the town. RIP Crab Orchard. Now I don't even see your Cobra Gunship as I nonchalantly bypass the old downtown. Brodhead will be bypassed this summer. RIP Brodhead.Maybe I'll be more pleasant and optimistic when Global Warming finally arrives. Come on Al!!
