The Blizzard
We went waterfowl hunting.
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By we, I mean my son, his girlfriend, and the dog. We loaded up in the Dodge D3500, and we went waterfowl hunting
The highways were all closed, so I got there by going through a small farm belt here, hitting a rural road, and taking it to the river, the back way. We were the only vehicles on it.
Yes, this can be argued, and probably correctly driving out in a blizzard was not smart. But people wanted to go, and it looked like good waterfowl hunting weather, which in fact it was.
Out on the river, in fact, the weather wasn't nearly as bad as it was in town. It snowed lightly off and on, but it wasn't a blizzard. At some point, it had been, as the snow was quite deep.
And we had the river all to ourselves.
And has we headed back into town, the snowstorm cranked up again.
And yes, there were some spots on the road that were really bad. Only the fact that I was driving a very heavy, and powerful, diesel 4x4 allowed us to get there. Frankly, a 1/2 ton gasser probably wouldn't have. And yes, you ought to stay off the road in weather like that.
We were going to do this on Sunday, New Year's Day, but the blizzard made that impossible in town. It was also rendered impossible by the fact that the batteries on the diesel had given out the week prior, and I'd only learned that on Saturday when I was heading out, in advance of the storm, to hunt geese near Torrington. I changed, the batteries, in the blizzard, on Sunday after Mass, but only after nearly wrecking my very lightweight Jeep going to get the batteries.
The point.
Well, as follows.
I have a new neighbor across the street that I spoke to, two snowstorms ago. He's from Maryland and asked about the snow. I told him that it snowed all the way through April, as it does.
He apparently didn't believe me, as his next door neighbor, who was out while I was snow blowing when I got home yesterday, was stating that the same neighbor had asked him, that day, about the snow. He got the same information.
My prediction is that the new neighbor will leave.
Late last night, I got a text from a coworker. Should we close the office, today?
In fairness, the county has closed, and the school districts.
This is of interest as it's become, all of a sudden, a really common event. A couple of snowstorms ago, all of a sudden a coworker was asking if we should send people home early. It caught me completely off guard. It was very cold, and slightly snowy, but why would we do that? I vetoed it as I had stuff I had to go out, but this came after another similar event. Light snow, and we're sending people home. And we're not the only ones.
This is just an observation, really. Maybe it's a good thing that these events are taken more into consideration than they used to be. Or maybe we're really unprepared for them. Probably both. I'm glad they close the highways more than they used to, as they used to leave them open in horrible conditions. But I don't quite know what to make of the situation where people choose to move outside of town on a windblown flat, and then can't make it to work. It makes sense to me to close when weather is genuinely bad, but for regular in town operations, closing everything as a few folks might have trouble getting there, who should be given consideration for that, seems odd.
