It's time for my Lt Dan impression again. I'm going to tie a bandana around my head, find a Hawaiian shirt and an old pair of olive drab army fatigues to wear (too bad that army surplus store closed down in Boulder last year), and climb to the highest point outside my house. I'm going to scream into the wind, "Is that all you got?" I'm so desperate for more than a few token snowflakes to fall, and I feel like I'm being tortured by the wait. Why is it taking so long? It's November 10th. This was supposed to be the strongest El Nino year ever, and it was supposed to send storm after storm this way like cars on a freight train. So far the most I've seen is a little frost on the ground, in the shadows, early in the morning. I'm so frustrated by the wait. Every time I think it's getting close, I compulsively check the Weather Channel app on my phone. With this storm, up until this morning they were saying my town had a zero percent chance of precipitation, even as the local and national news were issuing blizzard warnings for counties all around us, in every direction. Okay, I know that a woman I met this summer, the wife of one of the guys from Mr S-P's high school circle, told me that Long's Peak creates this weird weather shadow, and we see very little snow here. But still, if every other place in the northern half of Colorado is supposed to see a fast-moving blizzard tonight, surely we could get an inch of blowing snow, if nothing else? The late news is being more generous, predicting between 2 1/2 and 3 inches for us. I would be happy with that.
It has been ten years since I lived in a very cold place, although eastern North Dakota didn't see as much accumulation of snow as I would have expected. Everything we got would blow north, then south, then across the state line into Minnesota within a day. In Colorado we learned "Big snow makes little snow, little snow makes big snow." That meant that big fluffy flakes were wet, and tended to melt quickly, but the littler flakes were colder and drier, and would pile up on the ground and stick around a while. Take that theory a few hundred miles north, and we learned the concept of "Too cold to snow." I never would have believed it until I spent a winter where we would go weeks at a time with the temps below zero degrees Fahrenheit, to the point where a day with abundant sunshine, no wind, and the temperatures in the low single digits was t-shirt weather. Well, perhaps not that, but it meant no gloves and you didn't bother to zip up your jacket. Twenty or twenty-five degrees below zero, and the air just dried right out. No snow.
I'm going to look back at these few weeks of blogs sometime next year, around March or April, when I'm desperate for the snow to stop, and I'm going to wonder what I was thinking, begging for the snows to start. I only had a few snowstorms blanket my house in the three years we were in New Mexico, which just wasn't enough variety to keep me happy over the last ten years. A big part of the reason we moved back here was the desire to live somewhere that gets all four seasons, not shorting any one of them their full development and enjoyment. I enjoyed the heck out of autumn, but I'm ready to move on to the next round. Come on, already.
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