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16 SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | FEBRUARY 2023 By Bev Splitgerber, Resident We no sooner pack our last box of Christmas bulbs and holiday decorations, take a little breather, and poof! All of a sudden it's Valentine's Day! It's a good thing we don't seem to feel the need to decorate our homes to the extent of the Christmas extravaganza, with lights, trees, figurines, etc. But Valentine's Day advertising, in the stores and on TV, seems to be exploding each year into more of a big frill with all the gift ideas and trinkets. Maybe that's a good thing — a fun and delightful thing, to bridge the gap twixt the December holidays and springtime. I can remember when Valentine's Day in the upper peninsula of Michigan was a very exciting interlude right in the middle of a white crisp winter. There always seemed to be a few mild days in early February to melt the snow, causing a moist slush on top to soften the white pile-up fluff of prior weeks that gently, or not so gently, fell. You always knew it was nearly Valentine's Day when this soft melt would form on the hillsides and lawns. It would freeze during the frosty nights, causing a glistening crust to form as the sun shone along the white blanket of land. We kids would carve a heart shape with our mitten fingers into the blanket of shiny glaze, reach underneath the crust top and "pick up" our frozen valentine. We'd carry it away to the back porches and stoops to show our mothers, or sometimes just give it to our friend who was also carving these hard-crust hearts along with us. Sometimes the snow heart would break apart, so we'd start all over again with the quick carving. We'd make several sizes, line them up along the snow from smallest to largest, making a path of hearts. These snow valentines wouldn't last long. We either lost them through the next mild days of melting or through more snowfalls covering them forever. We may have lost our treasures of crusty snow in their physical way, but I'm sure most of us who created them recall making them, and we think of that time long ago as the February mild days once again become a part of our lives. Remembering those days of yesteryear, we share with our families what we used to do on a winter's day. The snow creations may have vanished, but our youth and the lives we lived have not, as those fond memories remain in our hearts. Even though a California Valentine's Day (with warm weather and winter rains) is different from those of a Midwest yesteryear that I recall, Valentine's fun and new memories can be just as special in ways discovered here by today's children, and even by us older folk. This special Heart's Day with all of its enjoyment is still a nice interlude between Christmas, other holidays in December, and springtime. By Daniel Mendez, Resident The MyShake app was developed by the UC Berkeley Seismology Lab sponsored by the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services to provide statewide earthquake early warning alerts to Californians. ABC News 7 reported: On December 20, 2022, at 2:34 am, hundreds of thousands of Bay area residents were jolted out of bed by an earthquake early warning system alert on their cell phones. "We've sent over 65 or 70 alerts to various places in California, but this is the biggest alert we've sent out so far," Richard Allen, the director of the UC Berkeley seismology lab said. "This alert went out to 270,000 users of the MyShake app last night. The amount of warning depends on how far away you are from the epicenter. If you're close, maybe you get only one second of warning. If you are further away like Monday night in the Bay Area, you could have a full minute before you feel the shaking. Plenty of people felt it according to USGS, from San Jose to Medford, Oregon. "That's the value of early warning - so people protect themselves — they don't fall over or have things fall on them and we can significantly reduce the number of injuries," Allen said. MyShake App Memory of a Long-Ago Valentine

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