I slowly started waking up this morning when my phone started going crazy with text messages. Given the massive amount of rain we received last night, I figured it related to snow in the mountains. Sure enough, that is the primary subject of all those messages.
My son made the mistake of showing my 7-year-old granddaughter webcam pictures of the snow up at Alta. She responded, "Can we go skiing today?" My wife immediately shot back that her grandfather would take her, implying that there is no minimum amount of snow I wouldn't try to ski on. I will confess that the thought did cross my mind until I took a closer look at those webcam images. No we need a lot more snow before I'll brave the conditions. Fortunately we are expecting more precipitation through Wednesday. Unfortunately my schedule won't let me be able to take my granddaughter skiing until Friday afternoon and the snow might not be around then.
The Internet has given us a number of tools to help us know what is happening in the world around us. While it is easy enough to look out the window to see what the weather is doing, we can also use websites to see what the weather is doing anywhere. While I use it to check local ski resorts, I can also check out snow conditions in Colorado, France, or even Japan. For those that don't like the snow and cold, you can check beach webcams around the world. One of my buddies constantly has a webcam up on his computer of his favorite surfing beach in Hawaii.
This access to instant information had me remembering how I used to get ski-resort information as a teenager. Mobile phones didn't exist nor did digital cameras that make placing images online so easy. Now that I think about it, "online" didn't exist either. We didn't have the benefit of websites. We did get a daily newspaper though and could find all sorts of information there. If the paper didn't have what you wanted to know, you either did without or gave someone a phone call. You just needed to know who to call.
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