"March 29, 2009"
http://www.spaceweather.com/
"Daily Sun: 28 Mar 09 The sun is blank--no sunspot. Sunspot number:
0"
"Far side of the Sun: This holographic image reveals no sunspots on
the far side of the sun."

The face of the Sun is without blemish:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images20...vo28dr9d hj43

Please visit:
http://blog.nj.com/southjersey_impac...SolarCycle.jpg

The right panel shows the face of the Sun as it looked on a good day
during the late Modern Warm Period. Sunspots are the apparent size of
craters on the moon. The left panel shows a Sun as it appears today.
Please write to Al Gore so that Al knows that the Sun is not living up
to his religious expectations. Al Gore is a divinity school dropout.
George Carlin had a better grasp of the true nature of God's creation,
than does Al Gore.

Please visit:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/newsl...es/sun-etc.jpg
which shows the relative sizes of the Sun and planets. Compared to the
Sun, Jupiter is the size of a pea, earth is the size of a grain of
sand.

Published March 29 2009

Ahlin: Twelve years since 1997 seems like blink of an eye

I’m sandbagging across from a high school student from Moorhead one
day last week when, for some reason or another, the line stops. While
we wait for it to start up again, we talk a bit, mostly about school
and the classes and activities he likes.

By: Jane Ahlin,

I’m sandbagging across from a high school student from Moorhead one
day last week when, for some reason or another, the line stops. While
we wait for it to start up again, we talk a bit, mostly about school
and the classes and activities he likes. I can’t remember what prompts
me to say something about the 1997 flood; however, when I do, he looks
slightly blank. Blushing, he says, “I don’t remember that; I was only
3.”

For me, 12 years was an eye-blink; for him, it was a lifetime.

On another day, I find myself across from a big strapping

32-year-old I drove to pre-school – certainly, not much math necessary
to figure out how many years ago that was. (Really, nobody handed the
sandbags off to me quite as gently as he did at any other location the
whole week.)

It was a week of unusual experiences – some heartbreaking, as folks
gave up and left their homes, and some thrilling, as buses full of
people pulled up and a straggling sandbag line of 20 suddenly became
two lines, 100-strong each. And then there were the frustrating times:
All the volunteers necessary showed up, but the materials – sand and
sandbags – lagged. Finally, there was disbelief that this could be
happening again, and not simply again, but worse than ever before.

My husband and I participated in some sandbagging in 1997, although
not nearly as much as this year, because on the day in 1997 when the
ice storm hit Wahpeton-Breckenridge and floodwaters first raged, his
father died.

The drive the next day from Fargo to Oakes, N.D., to make funeral
arrangements was surreal. Ice-layered telephone poles were broken off
like toothpicks, ice on top of water-filled ditches crowded the
highway, and in every direction, ice-blanketed fields glistened
(incandescent), daylight reflected in ways strange, ghostlike, and
unnerving. Here and there, wisps of fog descended, lending even
greater eeriness to the bizarre-looking expanse of countryside. We
kept saying, “It’s as if we’re driving across a moonscape.”

In memory that’s what it became: endless, barren, chilling moonscape
that over the next few days transformed into limitless lake. On
subsequent trips that week, wind gusts pushed tongues of water up to
lick the road as if some great water monster lurked in snowmelt and
overflow from creeks, streams, and rivers, ready to swallow up
everything. And yet, miraculously, the elevated road beds stayed dry
enough for driving.

We returned to a community gearing up for a monumental flood, and we
took part. Still, 1997 sandbagging memories blur: I think of taking
our son and his friend out of middle school to work on a nearby dike;
my husband remembers going down to Oak Grove to help out the night the
dike broke. More distinct are the photos and video of flood and fire
as Grand Forks went under days later. Overarching was the thought that
1997 was the flood of a lifetime.

We’d never see anything like it again – thank heavens.

But 12 years later, here we are. As I write this, nothing is sure
except that the 2009 flood tops the 1997 flood in Fargo-Moorhead
history. It even tops the 1897 flood. Like everybody else in the
community, we’re living hour by hour, hoping the flood stops short of
devastating both cities. The sense of other-worldliness so prominent
for us in the 1997 flood is not part of the experience this time.
Instead, this year’s flood comes with an underlying sense of
peevishness.

Yes, Mother Nature won’t be denied, but we’ve made it easy for her by
letting farmers drain every puddle and pothole in fields across the
watershed. We haven’t come to terms with the wild cards that the
Sheyenne and Wild Rice rivers – particularly the Wild Rice – play in
this flood game. In short, there’s more that we can do to alleviate
the threat. Twelve years may feel like a lifetime to a high school
student, but it ought to be 88 years short of the next flood of the
century.