Snowbound

It snowed for three straight days here.

I know…you’re from some part of the world where that’s nothing.  You make snow igloos that are as big as your house.  For six months of the year you don’t know if you have grass on your property or blacktop.

Of course, you’d be facebooking/tweeting/blogging/texting/talking about your weather phenomenon if it hit 114 degrees next week.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  They wouldn’t be writing about that in the middle of Australia.

In Portland, we see real snow that lasts more than 24 hours about as much as you probably see people doing their taxes on paper using a slide rule.

We usually get this light dusting that begins to melt as soon as it stops snowing.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not like Honolulu or Los Angeles seeing snow.  We can drive an hour from Portland and see all the snow in the world.  Mt Hood has the only summer skiing in the USA for a reason.  Crater Lake Oregon averages something like 600-700 inches per year.  Holy snowflakes, batman, that’s a lot of freakin’ snow.

And when there is snow here, the city shuts down.  Every channel sends their flunkies out onto the streets to cover the “blizzard”.  I guess that’s journalism hazing; a long standing tradition.

They’ll cover nothing else during the news.  But the reality is, that’s all I want to watch when it snows here anyway.  They add in something like news of a meteor on its way to end the world or the discovery of miniature unicorns that excrete gold and I flip the channel because all I want to watch is snow.

As the wifey-poo says, “Snow…it’s so pretty”…turn off that other stuff, I want to hear more about how much snow there will be.  I want to watch it out the window.

That all works when it snows and then clears off 24 hours later.  On those rare years that it actually dumps for more than one day, I realize what nearly everyone else that has to live with a lot of snow knows:  It gets old very quickly.

Yep, shut in the house for three days, I’m already over the romance of snow.  My favorite take out Thai restaurant is closed.  Getting to the store isn’t an option.  It’s not that I can’t get there, it’s that they’re out of everything I want because everyone else thought it was the end of the world, panicked, and bought out all the essentials.  Of course, none of the resupply trucks can make it in because these are the same people stranded on the roadways trying to get back home.  It’s a vicious cycle…

So, we’re tired of TV, card games and snow shoeing.  Turns out you can actually only have so much sex in a day unless you’re under 25.   We get an A for effort though.  Yes, snow just makes me go stir crazy if it lasts beyond 48 hours; I'm not used to it.

Guess I’m just the endless summer kind of person….I’m okay with that.