Sunday, February 14, 2010

Chapter MMMCCCXXIII: a meandering post about snow

What up?

For the first time in several years, I can say that it's been a snowy son of a bitch here in my corner of East Tennessee. We live down in a bowl, edged by the plateau to the northwest, Lookout & Monteagle Mountains to the southwest and the big rise of the Appalachians to the east. We seem to hold all the warm air (along with allergens and pollutants) long after the areas around us have gotten their share of snow and ice. In the past several years, when areas 60 miles from us have gotten three or four inches of snow, we've gotten flurries or sleety rain.

This year's been a little different. It can't begin to compare with what our friends and family up in the Mid-Atlantic have gotten in the past handful of days. It's been with a wry eye I view some of the news & pictures. I particularly enjoyed the news that the bread, meat and Pop Tarts had been freed from a new Food Lion up in Delaware, but they had plenty of beer and peanut butter on hand. I also liked the video from a friend in Virginia where they took their toddler out into the yard, and dropped him into snow taller than he was.

But we've gotten a handful of snow around these parts. Just enough to turn everybody into half a retard every few days, driving like mad to the grocery to fill up on bread, milk and eggs, as if French Toast were the one thing will save us all from a freezing death.

The weather systems are coming in such quick succession that to my mind, there is almost no way for a family to have gone through the $300 in groceries they bought just before the previous snow scare to warrant another cartful of groceries for the current snowpocalypse. To me, if your family's going through food that fast, then your biggest problem is not necessarily snow.

Still, it keeps me employed, so I'm not one to argue too much.

The weather systems seem to come in every three to five days. Lot of precipitation, in general. When it's not snow, it's rain.

I woke up late, on my day off Friday. I got up, tried to write and played on the timesuck that is Facebook for a couple of hours. I stood up and saw through a crack in the curtains that there was something white on the ground outside. Not thinking that snow was in our call (it was supposed to miss us to the south), I was pleased to find a half-inch of stuff on the ground.

I dig it, actually. Southeast Tennessee's an algae yellow mottled with brown pretty much from November to March. It's nice to cover some of that shit up, even for a day or two.

My friend Shyam's taken some nice pictures of recent events...

Like I said, it's not ridiculous snow, but it's an event enough for us.

Anyway. I write all this to say that we're calling for anywhere from 1 to 6 inches of show in this neck of the woods again tonight (depending on which weather person you decide to look at and listen to). I'm sure the workplace will be nutballs again today, despite people rushing out 2 days ago. Don't have a real point to this post, except to say Pray for Me....

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