This is something that is becoming more and more important to me as time goes on. And I can’t even really tell you why. I just know that it makes me happy when I have something nice to look at.

Maybe it’s because it’s not often that I used to actually stop and LOOK at anything. I never would know what I missed.

Here’s what I see when I wake up every morning. I love waking up (well, that’s a lie. Sometimes I really, really hate waking up!) and starting my day off looking at soothing colors.

Until I had it, I never knew what I was missing. But now, I love it. I wake up every morning feeling like I’m in a bed and breakfast, or on vacation. I get to see soothing blues from my bedroom, primrose yellow from the hallways, and a nice gentle brown from the living room. It’s this one spot in my bedroom that shows me all the colors. This, is just another simple pleasure that makes me happy.

The weather recently had been beautiful… 50-60 degrees, sunny. I thought I was finally able to hang up my hat and scarf.

But no, Mother Nature had some surprises, her latest being a winter storm dumping about 3 inches of snow upon us a few days ago.

But this was different.

Normally it snows, and for a few hours, it’s absolutely beautiful. Then the snowplows come through, creating brown snowbanks, and leaving slushy piles of snow in their wake.

However, because just a day before it was 55 degrees out, the snow was sticking to the trees and bushes, but leaving the roads seemingly untouched, and the snowplows still nestled in their garages.

Driving along for the past few days has been wonderful. This is the lovely side of winter I never get to see. No dirty snow, tall brown snowbanks, nothing to disillusion the winter wonderland. It’s like those first few hours after the snowfall was frozen in time, and continues to be…

“If it?s out there, it?s in here”. No, silly, not the Yellow Pages. I?m talking about the Internet. And if it’s out there, I?ll assume Google will find it.

You just gotta know how to look.

I’ve always enjoyed knowing that I can find the answer to anything I?m looking for on the Internet. I’m not about to start qualifying the validity of the answers I get, just that I get answers. As my brother once said, when I told him about eHow.com, “I could go there and tell the world how to perform a tracheotomy if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be correct, but I could do it.” We all know there’s lots of crap on the Internet, I’ll agree, and we’ll move on.

I love being the person everyone comes to with questions.

“How do I find out if my MX records have propagated?”

“My friend sent me this email about HIV needles on gas pumps. Is that true?”

“Who?s playing at Lupo?s tonight?”

Not to mention I have my own silly arsenal of endless “how do they?”, “what the heck is a…”, “how long has THAT been??”

Searching the web quickly is a skill I’ve acquired due to lots of practice*, and two factors without which I never could have done it: too much time spent surfing, and the rest of the time spent thinking up silly things I needed to find the answer to.

I’m not talking about professional trade questions, there are already places I can go to rely on the brilliance of others when I am stuck. It’s an old friend, that which I would not be where I am without it.

I’m talking about the far greater pressing inconsistencies of life, that which we accept, but often stop to wonder about. It’s those little details that nag at you long after the workday is done. How could you possibly have gotten through life without knowing? Before the Internet, one had to play Trivial Pursuit to find out the technicalities of how the Postal service works, how they get carbonated soda into cans without it overflowing, and my latest defeat: how did they install telephone wires across the ocean?

Yes, it is a sad, tragic, utter defeat.

I have looked. I have scoured. I have searched until I can search no more. I still do not have my answer. Are there piles of wires just sitting there at the bottom of the ocean? Is there just one wire? What if it breaks?

One day, I will find my answer, even if I have to read every last Trivial Pursuit card.

*The other part of the skill came into play when I discovered an amazing Internet-based game called, simply, The Stone. The Stone consists of a web site with a matrix of puzzles. The puzzles are images. They may have a mouseover, which reveals a word, they may not. You must solve the puzzle. What is the actual question? You have to figure out that, too. The game is played by plugging in what you see into the search engine, and piecing together clues to figure out what the puzzle is meant to be asking you. No two people probably visited the same sites to find the answer to the question. Not only is this a search engine skillbuilder, but it ends up taking you on a journey of great websites, history, and incredible bits of knowledge and trivia.