These are just some pictures that I took this morning of the snow that fell overnight. We only got a couple of inches in the city and since it barely gets below freezing and doesn't stay that way, the snow on the ground melted as soon as the sun came up.
A lot of you have asked for a picture of my WalMart and the second picture is that very store, with the mountains behind it. This is the best it has ever looked, kind of like a geeky teenager on prom night.
The news people are in an hysterical frenzy over the weather. There were predictions for freezing rain and possibly more snow this afternoon. Instead we got sunny and temps in the 40's. The five o'clock news is devoting the entire first thirty minutes to weather coverage. And not just any coverage, we get team coverage. Team coverage means that the entire staff is sent out to stand out in the cold, interview people dumb enough to talk to them and tell us how cold it was and how much inconvenience the snow caused.
In a desert city like ours, snow is so rare that we are completely unprepared for it, so chaos is somewhat inevitable and totally understandable. We drive on dry pavement for 99% of our lives. A lot of things happened today that have been an overreaction in retrospect, but we only get snow now and again.
Many schools chose to close for the day rather than have their buses out on icy roads. At my work a couple of people called in saying that the roads in outlying areas were impassable. Some roads were closed that probably should have been left open. We are amateurs at wintry weather.
Maybe you have experienced this but it seems that the smartest, toughest, most able and self-reliant people alive are the ones in our fair city that used to live somewhere else. I heard several folks today talking about how wimpy the locals are, because when they lived "back east", they drove through drifts of snow and gale force winds with no problem whatever. Unless there was a least a foot of snow they didn't even bother to plow, they just strapped one of the kids to the front of the car holding a shovel to push the snow away.
I suspect that if we suddenly had a plague of frogs some doofus would tell us something like this.
You call those frogs? I'm from Egypt and let me tell you that we know frogs. My great great...great great grandfather was Pharaoh and the god of Moses plagued him with frogs that were knee-deep. That was real frogs and he still made it to the job site to make sure the slaves were hard at it. Around here a few frogs show up and things grind to a halt. You people are a joke.
I hear this crap at work too. We have a couple of folks who will go to lengths to tell you how much harder and smarter people worked back where they came from. I like to think that dumber and lazier is not all bad.
This comment from a reader named Greg E. in the evening paper is typical.
Greg says, "As a Michigan resident, I find it very amusing to see the all out panic due to a trace amount of snow. This is hysterical!!!"
My response? Go the heck back to Michigan Greg, before we bring you down to wimp status. Your survival skills are going to waste here sir.
The fact is that I lived for many years in Omaha, Nebraska, one of the coldest places in the country, and driving in the snow was treacherous and most people weren't very good at it. The back east blowhards no doubt go home for a summer vacation an tell the folks in Michigan that they don't know what hot is.
Anyway, tomorrow the snow will be just a memory.
Merle.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky
Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor
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