Weatherly Perspective

When the national news is not talking about that crazy scene in DC-it's just a power-mad town-or someone rich and important doing something scandalous, word has been about the weather. Great maelstroms. Droughts. The midwest is apparently in the grips of another ice age.

Good thing nothing's wrong with the planet. That and there's no need for 'Merica to get involved with the Kyoto Protocol. Oh, and the rich people shouldn't be taxed, because, you know, they're going to save the rest of us cattle.

Wow...for a second there I almost got political...

There's the story of Atlanta being paralyzed by two and half inches of snow. Of course it was. It's the fucking south. My family lived in that region for three and a half unfortunate years when I was an adolescent. During our first winter, it snowed, once!, three muthafuckinginches no less, and the region we were in was paralyzed for a week. My mother made fun of the same people who called her, my brother, sister, and I yankees as she got around in the wintry wonderland without hindrance.

Yeh, calling us yankees...didn't they win that fucking war? Oh, and by the way, Colorado wasn't even a fucking state back when that war happened!

Sempai lived in Atlanta twenty years prior to coming to our Sahel. He remarks he had a better time of living in Appalachia than I did, and he's married, to a man. I surmise this was his urban verses my rural.

It's funny, as the sun sets, the sky clears from a two and a half day storm, I estimate a foot and a half to two feet of fresh snow. There was obligations and getting wood pellets for our stove. Shoveling and higher boots. You could hear the avalanches roaring not too far away. Travelers were terrified, transporters annoyed, and the locos got by. So it goes.

Sempai wishes the media would lay off Atlanta. It's the south, this shit happens maybe once every twenty years. I am sympathetic. Although my life in the Confederacy was not nearly as decent as his, I've seen how winter weather we don't even really blink at knocks the slats out from under those folks.

Of course, I remember southern heat and humidity vividly. Here at ninety-one sixty, we get above seventy-five quaint 'Merican degrees and it's a heatwave. One-hundred on the fahrenheit scale with as much humidity? We'd have old-timers dropping in all directions from heatstroke. Down there, they fan themselves, turn on the air conditioner along with the NASCAR, and sip something cool, which may or may not be laced with liberal amounts of alcohol. We start a fire and throw on an extra layer when it gets below forty.

Perspective is the buzzword of the day...

Our big winter storm made the metroplex news. Just enough to scare the flatlanders to not come up for a day, but to get the urban snowbums to touch themselves in their no-no places with glee as they ran for the hill-powder's gonna be good! A quick glance at the the national speaks that the novelty of Atlanta's recent weather 'pocalypse has gone and worn off. That's okay. Weather changes, as does what the hot news item is. Funny that.

Outside, the skies clear. It'll probably get rather frigid overnight. Come Sunday, I'll be off snowshoeing in the recent snow, and I can hardly wait for Tuesday, for more snow might come. Hopefully, the avi danger won't be so high. Half a world away, in Atlanta, the snow and ice will have disappeared into the stuff of apocrypha, fantasy, and/or nightmare, and that's okay. Different worlds, different landscapes, different weather. So it goes.