New realms of geekdom

Say it loud, say it proud, I'm a weather geek!
Steve pronounced me thus, with some surprise, and he's right. For years, I've quietly been reading the NWS forecast discussions on-line, trying to parse out what the forecasters mean with their myriad abbreviations and arcane terminology. But yesterday, I went on a weather hike sponsored by the local Audubon chapter (good lord -- I just had a total brain fade and couldn't figure out to spell that word. Thank goodness for google. It's still looking alien to me) and led by a meteorologist.
I peppered the man with questions all the way up and down the side of Coyote Ridge. At the top, we could see Pikes Peak, a more than two-hour drive to the south. We could also see the rising ground south of Denver known as the Palmer Divide, which, along with the also-visible upwelling at the Wyoming border, creates a bowl that protects the Front Range from the extremes of weather in this part of the country.
I found out how weather forecasts are created (my god, what an expenditure of weather sampling equipment! Two balloons a day, every day of the year, from thousands upon thousands of sites around the globe, drift off, rarely to be found or returned). I could bore you with the physics behind the warm Chinook wind, the Snow Eater, that blows off the mountains in winter, mysteriously warming us 20 to 40 degrees in an hour or two. I grok the rain shadow effect now, and I understand why we often have a scrim of clouds on our eastern horizon that cuts the glory of sunrise short so many mornings.
Disappointingly, I also discovered that we haven't adapted amazingly well to this climate after all. I'd been thinking that the fact that weather in the 20s seemed comfortable to us was a sign we had acclimated. But apparently, the same phenomenon at work in dry desert climates ("oh, it's 90 but it's a dry heat!") works in the cold as well. So 40 degrees in a moist climate can feel as cold as 25 degrees in a dry climate like ours. As long as the wind's not blowing!
He was animatedly expounding to me his frustration with the popular reliance on relative humidity as a measure of comfort instead of dew point (which I confess, was starting to make my eyes glaze over) as the walk came to an end. I can't wait to go out again in April when he'll explain the spring weather phenomenon. And the summer walks ought to be really exciting!
Oh, and for some reason this book, the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to North American Weather, which he showed us, really cracks me up! Something about the way cloud formations are treated just like the bird species in their other books seems delightfully absurd.
I returned from the hike to a sumptuous breakfast of crepes and two kids who wanted to get online and get going with World of Warcraft! We bought the game Friday, discovered my laptop didn't have enough memory, asked Steve to pick some up on his way home ("Honey, we need more memory, a load of equanimity and some compassion if you can find it on sale!") Then came the 10 hours of downloading updates that put gaming off until the next day.
We did finally get online and played it until an act of god interrupted our cable internet service last night. I'm guessing I'll be playing it shortly, as soon as the kids get up.
At first I was resistant to the game, as much of the quests center around killing (albeit NPC or non-player characters -- the computer generated ones), but as we played yesterday, I began to notice the random acts of kindness. Other players occasionally ran past us and threw a spell on us to improve our armor or stamina. Players would start fighting alongside us as we killed NPCs to finish a quest (at first, paranoid soul that I am, I thought they were trying to steal the loot you get after your quest NPC dies, but the game ensures that only the person who starts killing gets the loot and in fact they were just helping us out).
So, I'm warming up to it and the kids seem to love it. I have to make sure to get plenty of exercise before I sit down at the computer though, since the sessions seem to go on and on!