The strange part about it is that this is a very intelligent woman. But she seems to have a couple of neurons that are pre-programmed for disaster, if not downright cataclysm. I don't really know how panicked she gets when she picks up on these things because she seems almost calm—as if resigned.

After all, there really isn't anything one can do if the sun suddenly decides to go supernova. When I try to explain to her that the sun, a normal size G-type main-sequence star, is not massive enough to go supernova; that in 5 to 7 billion years, it will have used up all it's fuel and its core will collapse, at which time it will bloat temporarily into a red giant, incinerating the inner planets, including earth, before it collapses into a white dwarf, after which it will last for several billion more years before it finally fades into a dully glowing cinder.

But no, that can't be right. She heard it on her late night radio horror show.

Yet, so far, nothing she's heard on that program as actually happened. One Doomsday after another passes and we're still here.

But, as I say, in all else, she is acutely intelligent and perceptive.

In Seattle, we get a pretty good snow maybe once every seven or eight years, if even that often. By "pretty good snow," I mean maybe five or six inches. Seattle just isn't set up for snow, largely because, if we get a big snow—12 or 14 inches, say, it happens maybe once in twenty or thirty years. It may paralyze traffic for a few days and then it melts off and it's gone. Every year or so—not necessarily every year—it may snow an inch or two, enough to dust the roofs, but it rarely sticks for more than a few hours, unless the temperature stays in the twenties for a day or two, which doesn't happen that often. The streets, if covered with snow at all, are usually passable if one drives sensibly.

Barbara will ask her several weeks in advance if she would like to come for Thanksgiving dinner. She invariably responds, "Well, yes. If it doesn't snow!"

Don Firth