Introduction - December 21. 2011

It's the longest night of the year, or at any rate the night when the sun is furthest away from us in Minnesota. It seems an appropriate time to start writing something for a year.

I walked Anya this morning, and again at noon. I do this a lot, and so does my wife. Anya came to us through the Midwest Animal Rescue League last September, more than a year ago now, and we love her a lot. She's a St Bernard, small for her breed, who arrived in the rescue system not much more than skin and bones, with opportunistic infections and not much fur. She's much better now.

We don't have a fenced yard, so rain or shine, snow or hurricane, we're outside with her as she does what she needs to do. And I can honestly say I can't remember being so intensely aware of the weather as I have been this last year.

I don't think I'm that different from most Americans in this. When the weather is nice, we like to be outside. I keep a bit of garden, and we like to go for a walk when we get the chance. My son, who is nine, has discovered a passion for geocaching.

However, when it gets unbearably hot, or wet, or cold, or windy, we go from house to car to store to office, as quickly as possible. Here in Minneapolis, this is especially evident: We go from an average January low temperature of about 5°F to an average July high of around 85°F, which is about as big a gap as you can find south of Canada. We're not the snowiest place in the lower 48 states (upstate New York and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have us beat), nor the coldest or windiest (the Dakotas and northern Minnesota do that up right), but we get plenty of cold, and in the summer we get some serious scorchers.

Now, this could end up being a project about climate change... we're having a warm winter this year, with no appreciable snow on the ground just a few days before Christmas, and the new, warmer climate is on a lot of peoples' minds. But that isn't what this is about. I want to look at how we have found ways to avoid weather—to protect ourselves from it, get out of its way, and build our world such that it can slide past us, sometimes annoying, but seldom the awesome calamity we like to make it out to be. How have we done this? If this project has anything to say about climate change, its about the camouflage patterning we've erected around us to shield ourselves from the idea that weather matters.