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Fire or Ice?

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Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.


At ease, civilians!

But when I say ‘at ease’ of course I mean you should remain extremely watchful. A healthy amount of trepidation is better for you than multivitamins, as we just discovered, though that’s mostly because everything is better for you than multivitamins.

And do not worry that you will ever run out of things to fear because there is always another catastrophe looming on the horizon.

Case in point: I have spent many hours worrying that a major asteroid will crash into our planet, causing an enormous explosion that will eject massive amounts of dirt and gas into the atmosphere, obliterating the sun and making life as we know it unsustainable.

But last week I discovered that maybe I should be looking down instead.

Yellowstone_caldera

New research suggests the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park is much bigger than previously thought.. Now they’re saying it could be 55 miles across, which makes it big enough to cause an enormous explosion that will eject massive amounts of dirt and gas into the atmosphere, obliterating the sun and making life as we know it unsustainable.

Of course scientists say they are monitoring Yellowstone closely and there is no indication that it is in any way about to blow. Should changes occur that suggest an eruption is at hand, we would have time to prepare.

Somehow I’m not comforted.

And what if an asteroid crashed into the Yellowstone caldera? Wouldn’t that set it off immediately? This is the sort of thing that keeps me awake on long winter nights, which is, by the way, the season we’re in. It is a time of despair, which suits me just fine. I may be the only person who has seasonal affective disorder all year round. Stepping outside, I pause to wonder if the prevailing northwest wind will freeze us in our tracks before we can be incinerated by speeding rocks from above or molten rock from below.

It reminds me of my favorite poem about armaggeddon, Fire and Ice by Robert Frost.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Yours in Safety, B.S.O.R.

Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty is at his usual life-of-the-party best here. He suggested this post should run on Christmas Day because it might give families a chance to talk about their Volcano Evasion Plan over dinner, but I hinted to him it was a bit of a downer and we might go with it a day or so early. He said the prospect of things happening before he expects them to is another scenario that keeps him up at night.

Fire or Ice – what’s your preference?

45 thoughts on “Fire or Ice?”

  1. I’m REALLY glad you didn’t run this one on Christmas Day. Sometimes when we hear from BSO Rafferty, I feel like that proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. I don’t really want to contemplate about going out in either a fiery blaze or a polar plunge. Even just trying to think about it to answer today’s question gives me the willies. Asteroids and super volcanoes don’t bother me; since I figure there is nothing I can do about either of them, why bother worrying about them.

    On a much happier note, Nonny comes today. I get her for a whole week!

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    1. Rise and Burn Baboons!

      BSOR is a downer kind of guy. Avoiding him at Christmas will make for a more joyful holiday–he will not appear at my house that day. I am not sure if he is just depressed, (Dysthymia–long term low grade depression lasting more than 2 years) or anxious and phobic, grimly spreading his downer wealth to his public kinda like Fox News. He reminds me of the parents of school age children who drive their children to the door of the school daily in fear of….suffering? abduction? getting exercise?, thus fueling childhood obesity.

      So there is no way out of this? It is one or the other? If we find the middle ground, the temps could approach 78*–Heaven as far as I am concerned. Perhaps suffering is of our own making in an effort to avoid all pain entirely?

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        3. Well, it is different than Obsessive compulsive disorder, which is an anxiety disorder characterized by rituals and obsessive thoughts. OCPD is a personality disorder characterized by perfectionism, the idea that one is always right,inflexibility in thinking and attitudes,preoccupation with rules, details, and schedules, miserly spending habits-I guess Scrooge would be another example.

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        5. Renee, that’s what I know, too. When I stumbled upon the article about it in Wikkipedia, my jaw dropped to the floor, because it fit someone I know to a T. Even all the sub-types were spot on. It explains a lot but it doesn’t make it any easier to get along with that person. I read somewhere that OCD people mainly drive themselves nuts, but OCPD people drive others bonkers. Too true.

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        6. You don’t run into them very often in therapy, since they often don’t see themselves as needing to change. (Unless two ghosts in chains and three spirits visit them on Christmas Eve.)

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        7. Edith, Renee obviously knows more about this than I, although I did a little reading. These people can be bright and are sometimes effective at disappearing into the background, going unnoticed. But they very rarely stay married.

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      2. I’ve always thought that Mark Dayton is dysthymic and have hated it when ignorants refer to him as “mentally ill”. I’ve known some who’ve spent entire lifetimes enduring this low-level form of depression since it’s rarely diagnosed unless clinical depression engulfs them. It’s one of those “does a fish know it’s in water?” dilemmas.

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      2. Ha ha… Nonny will love this. Teenager is home until January 20. Nonny is here for a week!

        So, when should Teenager become Young Adult, do you think? She turns 19 next month! Or should she become College Student for the intervening years????

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        1. Well, you are VS, so she could be CS. My CS came home last week and has been holed up in her room, only coming up for air when she wants me to cook some delicacy for her. She also has been crocheting, a skill she learned in her Genocide class! I guess they are sending crocheted blankets to genocide survivors in Rwanda.

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        2. i think she should be former teenager when the time comes or maybe she could become a person with a name. i think her being the former teenager will be great in 20 or 30 years when she is telling her kids why we all call her the former teenager. it dates us and we definitley need to be dated.

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    4. Perhaps this nick name for a grandma is a lot more common than I thought? My 10 (soon to be 12) grand kids call me “Nonny”, too. We called my grandma “Nownie” (no clue why).

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      1. I like “Nonny” but decided to not do that, because little kids pronouncing Nonny sound too much like how they pronounce youngest daughter’s name.

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  2. I think in this case I would prefer ice, since I live closer to Yellowstone than the rest of the baboons and I would be obliterated first. An asteroid could hit anywhere, not necessarily close to ND.

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      1. Thanks for the link. It is an unfortunately accurate article. My town is not as negatively affected, due to good planning and the fact that we are just on the edge of the Bakken formation. The city of Williston doesn’t even have a homeless shelter since, for some odd reason, city laws prohibit such facilities and city officials recently shut down a shelter in one of the churches. One of the Lutheran churches in Williston responded by having all night “prayer vigils” staffed by parishioners when the temps go below zero at night, and if homeless people come in and fall asleep in the padded pews, well, it is officially considered a church service and the city can’t do anything about it,.

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        1. Heartbreaking stories. Glad your town isn’t as negatively affected, Renee, though I’m sure it’s bad enough. It pains me to think that “we” have learned so little from previous booms of various kinds. I love the idea of all night “prayer vigils.”

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    1. Wonderful. In fact it is going to rain out here tonight. We are currently in a wind chill advisory, but the temperature is supposed to warm up to 32 degrees tonight and then the freezing rain and sleet will hit us. Ice, but we will hope there will be no fire.

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  4. Good morning. I think fire and ice are both extremely bad. I very much dislike really hot weather and feel the same way about excessively cold weather. However, as much as I hate the cold, I can put up with it by putting on lots of clothes. You can strip down to reduce over heating. However, on a really hot day you will still be too hot even if you remove all of your clothes. I guess I have a slight preference for ice over fire if it came to making a choice.

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  6. What would BSOR have to say about putting out many pounds of financial statements, leaving them in paper bags to be recycled? The bank statements and documents about my reverse mortgage do not have my passwords or other key data to gain access to the accounts. So theoretically, this would be safe. But my guess is that BSOR would have a cow if he knew.

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    1. He will probably write a post soon about the importance of getting a shredder that shreds documents of that sort into teeny-tiny pieces.
      If you want to borrow a shredder, I have a decent one. I could bring it over and we could have a shredding party.

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  7. I love that poem, Dale – maybe because we memorized it in high school. But I really don’t want either one. How about they just keep alternating – fire, ice, fire, ice – so we come out balanced in the end.

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  8. This is the way the world ends.
    This is the way the world ends.
    This is the way the world ends.
    Not with a bang but with a whimper.

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  9. I’ve always heard that freezing to death is rather peaceful and that people who’ve “come back” before almost passing over say that it’s not unlike being stoned. Fire, on the other hand, hurts a lot a lot –
    plus it could take several minutes.

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  10. i spent years in yellowstone and turned it into my second home. when i was the vw bus guy i thought it was boring. roads cut in the ponderosa pines that pulled intoo a parking lot wher you got to go see freaks of nature. give me a snow capped mountain anytjhime was what i used to think. then my friend bight a hotel in livingston on the other side of the paradise valley form yellowstone 1/2 hour away and i went through a divorce where the kids would leave every christmas morning to see their moms family in milwaukee and i would head off to yellowstone for christmas and new years and be back the first part of january. fell in love with the forzen park the cross country sking and view after the fire took all the trees. then in the summer i would take the kids to the park and we would go and ge ttht ejunior ranger badges and go on hikes and see the far reaches of the park ( as much as you could with munchkins and all) and on the guided ranger hikes and tours there was alweays one where the ranger showed us the history of the caldera and the fact that it blew up 2 millinon years ago anf then again 1 1/2 million years ago and then 1 million years ago then 500 thousand years ago and now the vegetation and the stuff inside the caldera has had time to adjust and you can barely see it if you are here on land… if you ar ein a plane it looks like we are in a hole. and lets see 2 ,million 1 1/2 million , 1 million 500 thousand years and you know when the next time is it is likey to blow up?????????? NOW!!!!!!!!! and the kids would jump and the group would laugh and it was funnier the second and third time they got caught than the first.
    comet or volcano, comet i think. right on the head please. the volcano would choke out the sun and make it cold and miserable and someone would find a way to make grow lights work and have a world undergorund filtering the volcanaic ash through the strainers so we could survive and eat tomatos and lettuce from some seed saver and pretend life was ok, but heck when its time to go its time to go. get it the heck over with and get on with the next act. i have done this one to death, now…
    and we were just talking about bathtub safety officer rafferty and how i believe my children were my first awareness of his existence. i would write in for birthday requests for my children s bathub dancing and officer rafferty would pop up every time with the warnings of the dangers of bathtub dancing. oh they thought it was wonderful dancing with bears little potato. i feel good, bop til you drop move it til you lose it dance dance. nah nah anh bathtub safety officer rafferty we are still bathtub dancing.. ha ha ha …

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  11. Fire seems to me destructive, while ice can be preservative. Both can certainly be uncomfortable in close proximity. But I’m going with ice. People in hell want ice water, I’m told.

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