helping hints to vacationing at home

I absolutely love Real Simple. Todays ‘tip of the day’ talks about how we can vacation at home. There are some great little hints that some of you may already have thought of but it is still worth checking out.

pea-size brain it is

An ostrich’s brain is smaller than it’s eye.

generation gap

Here’s a brief comparison of three generations:

music:

baby boomers: the British invasion, punk rock
gen-Xers: grunge and hip-hop
millennials: Emo, American Idol

movies:

baby boomers: Easy Rider, The Graduate
gen-Xers: Ferris Bueller’s Day off and Clerks
millennials: The Matrix and American Pie

TV:

baby boomers: All in the Family and SNL
gen-Xers: Simpsons and the Real World
millennials: South Park, Survivor

historic moment:

baby boomers: JFK assassination, Watergate
gen-Xers: Challenger explosion and fall of Berlin wall
millennials: Lewinsky scandal, 9/11

for fun:

baby boomers: foosball and 8-track tapes
gen-Xers: Pac-Man and MTV
millennials: MySpace and iPods

how to tell how close a thunderstorm is

It is actually very easy to calculate how close a thunderstorm is. Basically, for every 5 seconds between the sight of lightening and the sound of thunder, the storm is one mile away.* So for example, if you count 30 seconds between lightening and the sound of thunder, the storm is 6 miles away.

*Info obtained from the June 8-10 edition of USA Weekend, in the Weather Quiz.

and the wettest large U.S. City is?

Many of you may think it is Seattle, and with 150 days per year of precipitation it definitely ranks up there. But it is not the wettest. The top wettest large city in the U.S. is actually Syracuse, NY. This city gets 174 days of precipitation a year.

Or if you are measuring by how much (not how often) then the award goes to Mobile, AL and New Orleans, as both cities receive well over 60 inches of precipitation a year.

*Information obtain from the Weather Quiz from USA Weekend June 8-10 edition.

become your own library

I subscribe to RealSimple magazine (thanks, Scott!) and I find lots of useful information in every edition. In the July 2007 magazine, I found mention of a website you could go to create a searchable catalog of you books as well as chat with other who read the same things you like to read. I checked it out and it looks pretty cool, kind of a flickr for books. Thought I’d pass it along.

heat calculation

Good news! Crickets are not a nuisance after all. Apparently, you can figure out how hot it is by counting cricket chirps.* First, count the number of chirps in 15 seconds then add 40. The end number is the temperature (degrees Fahrenheit) at ground level. Air temp influences crickets, so the hotter it is, the more chirping you will hear.

*Information provided in the USA Weekend June8-10 edition, Weather Quiz

Arizona is the sunniest state

Per Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist for the Weather Channel, Arizona beats out Florida as the sunniest state* when you compare the total amount of sunshine possible in a year with the actual amount received. He states that Florida gets 60 to 70% on average while Arizona gets 80-90% of possible sunshine.

*This information was given in the Weather Quiz found in the June 8-10 USA Weekend publication.