Mother Nature is Testing Me

As luck would have it, Mother Nature seems to hate my guts. That old broad knows how much I HATE snow, and yet wherever I go, freakishly severe winters follow me.

What's that about?! Take Exhibit A:
The winter of 06-07 was the coldest winter Provo, UT had seen in 15 or 20 years. That was also the 1st winter I lived anywhere with regular snowfall. The above photo is actually the following winter, which was also abnormally cold, but since I don't venture out in such weather it's hard to find photographic evidence of the 1st winter I spent in UT. You get the idea though.

Exhibit B here is the FALL - that's right people, the F-A-L-L FALL - of 09 in Denver, CO. I lived there for 6 weeks, between the end of September and the beginning of November. It snowed 4 times I think, including this rather obnoxious storm that kept us inside from Tuesday night through Friday afternoon. Yes that's a pumpkin on my brother's porch. We were worried for a minute that Halloween would be canceled due to SNOW!!!

Now Exhibit C: I reside in Arlington, VA, just across the river from Washington DC. DC is a lovely city known for its temperate winters. It gets cold, but it doesn't dump snow for days on end. It snows here so little that things shut down in a big way with just a few inches on the ground. I thought I'd bypassed their major storm for the year by arriving just after it concluded. Not so. Instead Mother Nature decided that one city-stopping storm wasn't enough and sent another one our way. The snow started on Friday morning and fell heavily until Saturday night...
It fell SO heavily in fact that these dump trucks filled up, dumped elsewhere, then came back for another load at a constant pace from the time the snow started. If you looked outside though, it's as if they were never there at all.

Our bldg has one of these mini riding-snow-mover-thingies to keep our walks reasonable (notice I didn't say "clear"). Hooray for the grounds crew! I'm so sorry they were out in that!

I decided that since this storm is such a big deal, and since it has me confined to a 2-stop radius on the Metro (they've closed service to any stations that operate above ground) I should go out and document it... and run around like a child. The above is the end of my dive into a snowbank, and the below is Lori starting hers (although she totally weenied out and kinda gingerly placed herself in the drift. WEAK!).

We explored our neighborhood and found a few establishments actually opened their doors to the public! Good thing too. Several of the bldgs in our neighborhood were without power yesterday. Our foyer was starting to look like a refugee camp. In our ramblings I saw this trashcan that looks a lot like a frosted cupcake.


So the weather can beat me down and keep me locked up in my neighborhood, but I can make the most of that. Cheers to snow days. May we have NO MORE this year.