Call me clueless. I've been looking at the Sawtooth Mountain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_Mountains_(Minnesota) range almost daily for most of my 48 years, and today, (Saturday, March 20th, 2010) for the first time, I noticed that you could see the Moose Mountain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutsen_Mountains ski hill as plain as day from the Grand Marais Coast Guard parking lot. Since when was this possible? See above.

Last Thursday at Sven and Ole's Trivia Night, I asked the question: On average how many times do we blink in a minute? Well, the answer is 19 times a minute.

So, just for fun, and possibly to prove how neurotic one can get, I put a stopwatch to 19 blinks and came up with a tally of roughly 5 seconds equals 19 blinks and multiplied the 5 seconds by 60 minutes and multiplied that number (300) by 16 waking hours (figuring 8 hrs of sleep ya know) and came up with 4800 seconds a day are missed with your eyes closed, or, put it another way, about 8.35% of every waking hour.

With this number in place, I looked up the average life expectancy of a U.S. citizen and found the number, 78 yrs, and took away the 33% for sleep, (ya know the 8 hrs. a day) arriving at 52 years, and then multiplied that by 8.35% and came up with a grand total of (this is roughly mind you) 4.34 years with your eyes closed.

I'm here to tell ya, if you wanna get the most out of life, wear goggles, and if you think that might look dumb, stay out of dusty environments if and when possible. You heard it here first.