Thursday morning, rather late. Snowing vigorously outside and accumulating. Fortunately it is a very light snow. I'm going to let it fall today and clear tomorrow. Or Saturday. I hope.
We are right on schedule. Talk in the mornings is about warm climates, sun, and sailboats. Or cheap apartments and sailboats. Or just sailboats anywhere warm. Or anything and anyplace other than right here on this ridge with all of this snow about us. Year six. Is there any escape?
Went to town yesterday to do a little business. We had lunch at the Wolf where we also saw and briefly talked with my cousins -- Jack and Jamie and their spouses. Saw Jack and his wife Diana again outside the market and talked some more -- mostly about getting Zoe out on his ranch in an attempt to let her work some cattle. May follow up on that one, but it is both hard and awkward for me to talk with Jack...not his fault at all it's just that our lives (he is a lifetime rancher, I am a retired officer turned recluse and amateur intellectual) are so very different. Returned home with our groceries and a bag of same for some neighbors. We are buying them odds and ends this year for the first time. Usually eggs, inexpensive wheat bread, milk and occasional other simple fare (yesterday it was Colby cheese). They do not make much money at all and buying food is hard. Even so they gave us almost 40 lbs of elk at Christmas. Also, if Ed didn't plow these roads up here in winter, and wasn't available for the occasional handy-man emergency (i.e. helping me put in a culvert to divert spring runoff away from our leach field) it would be near impossible for us to live here year round. So buying a bit of food, and giving him a small amount of cash each month is the very least we can do. And we'll keep on doing it.
And today, the falling snow is the main feature. The NOAA forecast has progressed from "light snow, little accumulation" through the all-too-familiar build-up to Winter Storm Watch and, this morning, Winter Storm Warning with "significant accumulation" and "extremely hazardous driving conditions." I know that they have their computer models and experts to interpret the various charts. I also know that they wait until they're pretty sure before they issue the warnings. But. I can almost guarantee that a 'snow event' forecast several days out with apparently little impact will become a 'major snow event.' hours before whatever plans we might make based on anticipated 'light to moderate impact.'are set to begin and then unravel. I can 'model' the advance of these warnings with almost 100 percent accuracy. My model assumes that NOAA's assurance of light snow in the forecast will become heavy snow when it's least convenient. That is something I can surely count on.
Sigh. So it is snowing, hard at times. Cold enough that the accumulation is staying mercifully light. That's the weather today. The weather now.
We will live in the present moving forward. Zen, right?
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