Teleidoscope

Wed, Dec 20, 2006

Blizzard

Posted at 12:03 pm MST to Current Events

We are having a blizzard today: they are predicting a couple of feet of snow by noon tomorrow. At the moment it's kind of hard to tell how much accumulation we are getting: the snow I see outside my windows is mostly moving sideways.

Schools not already out for the holidays are closed. The major highways to Kansas and New Mexico are closed, and I'm not sure about I-70 through the mountains. Most airline flights are being cancelled. Government offices are closing early. Stores are closing at noon at some big shopping centers. On December 20th.

This is actually fairly rare for the Denver area. In the years I have been here, I'm pretty sure we have had more White Halloweens than White Christmases. (Late December tends to be dry.) And I think White Thanksgivings and White Easters fall somewhere in the middle. We get most of our moisture in March and April in normal winters, so Easter can be high-risk.

I wonder if El Nino is affecting things... the weather pattern this year, both in Colorado and in Boston, has been very strange.

They say this blizzard may be as bad as the Christmas Blizzard of 1982. I remember that one. I ended up going to Aunt Irma's place in Florida for New Year's instead of Christmas because everything was shut down.

My holiday visit only overlapped with my brother Larry's by one day or so, but that was a great day. We went to Epcot, which was brand new, on New Year's Day and were able to get into everything we wanted to see very easily. There were no lines to speak of until mid-afternoon.

Fortunately, this year I don't need to go anywhere for the holiday. And I postponed a short gig at Bell Labs Denver until after the blizzard. My projects for today include:

• Clean the last lower cupboard in the kitchen, which the mice don't seem to have gotten to too badly, since it was mostly pots and pans, and too open for nest building. That will finish the kitchen and pantry. But the dishwasher is getting another major workout.
• De-mousify the dining room hutch, which I discovered yesterday had been very popular with the mice. Yuck.
• Finish putting ornaments on the Christmas tree. (I did the lights, garlands and about half the ornaments last night).
• Bake cookies in my nice clean kitchen.
• Make a batch of Nonna's bean soup. This is soup weather, and I have all the ingredients.

I think I may have had a Christmas mouse in the house while I was gone. Or else they were really desperate. When I have had mice get in in the past, they usually didn't eat white sugar or hard candy. But there were some candy canes in both the pantry and the dining room hutch that are gone now.

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