Ultimate!

Recently, I had the chance to help introduce a new sport to this country: Ultimate Frisbee. One of the world's best games.

Most of our friends who played this game had never thrown a Frisbee at all before but they learned very quickly. I think their familiarity with basketball and soccer helped them to easily understand basic passing and movement without the disc.

Plus, we got to play on the beach which is one of the best ways to play. Here are some picture, sorry they aren't the best ones, but I had to be careful not to show faces. In one you'll notice our friend LeBron (yes, that's his name) doesn't quite understand Ultimate is a non-contact sport.

Blue, er, Gray Skies!

While smog is common here, we do sometimes have blue skies, like today (today we even have white poofy clouds!), but this is rare. Here's a picture of a particularly low visibility day (and a picture from today to prove blue skies can happen).

Where the government control everything . . . even the weather

The weather here is the same as the upper Midwest with three additional words needed: Dry, Dry, Dry.

The city I live in experiences 4 seasons, with the summer being a little hotter than the Midwest and the winter a little milder than Minnesota, but in no season is precipitation common. This year we had zero (that's right 0) days of precipitation in October, November, and December. Then finally, one day in January it snowed a quarter of an inch (maybe a half).

So, yes dry.

A few weeks ago we finally got a break and it rained two days in a row. I was quite amazed, and then even more amazed when I was told the rain was man-made and that the government had seeded the clouds, so that the rain would fall.

My life is weird . . . and dry.