Winter 2.0

After a couple of weeks of 60 - 70F here, we are plunging back into the chill of winter.  It's not supposed to be any deep freeze or anything too nasty, just cold 30's F, wind & possibly some rain.  Hopefully it will put my allergies on hold for a while.   A lot of people are griping that they've already started getting ready for spring.  So, like Winter cars what you're ready for, it's going to be cold regardless of what you wanted.

The little groundhog lied, or at least wink-wink-nudge-nudged.

The point is, that there are a lot of things in this life you can't prepare for, but there are plenty of others that you can & even more you should have expected.  Just because it's felt like Spring around here for a couple of weeks doesn't change the fact we still have another month of actual Winter.  Putting away your extra blankets, turning off your heater's pilot light or anything else you might do to dewinterize your home is just plain dumb until you've seen a week of solid upper 70's & possibly a couple of 80 F days.  This may be the time to plan for your gardens & start thinking about where you'd like to spend Spring Break (if you get one), but it's still Winter.

There are so many times in our lives when we just plain fail to register our situations or at least have failed to have planned for them.  This is common when we're young, possibly even acceptable in some situations.  I love  Sandra Rinomato's show Property Virgins.

It always amazes me how little preparation these people have done to get ready to buy a home.  They don't understand the property values, they have no idea what closing costs are, what's a property inspection, etc...  I may not know all of this, but you can bet if I was going to buy a home, I'd start doing some serious research on the matter.  It's all on the net.

If information is available & accessible to you & you refuse to utilize it then you aren't ignorant, you're being willfully uninformed (read stupid).  It doesn't matter if your talking about how to ride out the seasonal weather, buying a home or avoiding becoming +, all the info is out there for you to use.  If you don't employ this information than you have no one but yourself to blame for whatever happens.

This isn't to say that if you play by the rules & have all the available info on hand you won't have problems.  You can still run into a lot of hell.  Around here, we have notable Winters, usually in the teens to twenties.  Sometimes we touch the zero mark on the thermometer, but this year we hit -30F in some place & got over two feet of snow in less than a week.  If you're in Vermont or the like, that's probably common, but here in Oklahoma, that's hella' cold.  Mr. Mike Holmes has proven that buying a home even with a home inspection can be a nightmarish experience.  Nowadays, most of us know that there is safer sex, not safe sex.

Preparedness is an ongoing investment into one's own situation.  You can't say yeah I have a flashlight & batteries, then be upset when it doesn't work because the batteries are five years old.  It is your own responsibility to be as knowledgeable & prepared as possible.  No one is going to do it for you.  If it's winter, act & dress appropriately.  If you're going to buy a house teach yourself all that you can before going into the market.  If you're going to have sex, wear a condom, but be aware it's just one level of protection & it can fail.

In all aspects of life, your safety is your responsibility.   Be careful, so you can have fun with the rest of your life.