Cuzo's Rant #2

[Cuzosu]

As much as I love - love - snow, I feel the need to complain. My bf has been wanting to take a walk while it snows for nigh on a week now. This would be fine, except that the only time it's snowed lately is after dark. (Okay, this would still be fine - I may be insane, it's quite possible - but for the wind chill factor and the sheer wetness of the snow.) This...evening...morning...whatever you want to call it, I gave in. I said okay, let's go walk in the snow. (Keep in mind that I'm crazy enough that three feet of snow, wet pant legs and a morning outhouse trip merely has me calling it "nippy"...but that the snow was, once again, wet, and the wind wouldn't stop blowing.) I had on a nice fuzzy hat, my heavy-duty jacket which did its job admirably, and had doubled up my pants with a set of windbreakers as the outer pair. All well and good. And I never seem to notice much when my legs get cold anyway; the windbreakers just help keep some of the body heat in. Good enough.

But my face is still chilled and my nose was running - not that I could tell when it actually started, since that wet snow kept hitting my face and melting, and the wind just kept cooling it on my face so I could be that much colder.... And we were walking through drifts that were six inches to a foot deep, though in the windswept areas the snow went down to as much as an inch or less.

Yes. My wonderful, loving, usually-smarter-than-this bf decided to take a walk to the convenient store in the middle of such a night. It's about a fifteen minute walk each way in good weather. This was not good weather. Our time doubled.

Know what he said to me on the way back? "This might not have been the best time to go for that walk."

Gee, ya think, dear? *growls and grumbles*

Oh well. We got home and he lit a fire, I heated up water for instant cider (we need to go buy more real cider), and he made me a bowl of hot instant potatoes to go with my cider. I kind of nudged him into it, but my cheeks feel he deserved it. I'll make it up to him later.

On a (somewhat) different note, am I the only one who gets weather ironies? By which I mean...well, I'll explain the incident that stands out most in my own experience.

During one particularly dry year in autumn, I was walking home and passed a friend and his mom heading out. They pulled over, so I stopped to chat for a bit and my friend's mom said, "I wish it would rain."
Me being me, I had to drawl, "No, no, you've got to wish for the really miserable weather - like sleet and hail!" (Yes, I really was enthusiastic about it.)

The ironic part? Exactly two weeks later, to the day, I was 4wheeling with my dad and grandpa. We'd taken a nice long drive, had a picnic, were goofing around checking out the scenery on the way back...and when we hit about halfway back, the weather went from sunny and mountain-cool to, in the following order: rain, sleet, hail, sleet, and more rain. It stopped maybe a five minute walk from the truck - maybe. Truck didn't even get wet until we were loaded and on our way out again, but we were soaked, had hail stuck to us, hah, it was...for lack of a better description, ironic. We'd even tried to wait out the hail under trees, but it was so heavy - some of the hail we know for a fact was half an inch - that the trees weren't deflecting it, weren't sheltering anything. So we made for the truck in bad weather. Probably did double- or triple-time coming out, which maybe wasn't the brightest - there'd been spots we'd been cautious of on the way in that, for example, we practically flew over on the way out - but we had no accidents, just some really miserable weather.

My friend's mom - and my friend - got quite a kick out of it when I recounted the incident.

But really - am I the only one?

[Raymy]

What I think is somewhat ironic is that when anyone "wishes" for a specific type of weather, they usually are unhappy about it when it comes. That could be due to the phenomena that too much of a good thing is bad. "I wish it would rain" lady probably wishes it would stop raining by day 3. I grew up on the prairies (that would be north of Montana and N. Dakota) and our winters were coooold, with deep, dry snow. The shovelling was never ending, you had to use your imagination as to where the roads stopped and the sidewalks started, four-lane roads become two, if you were lucky! Some became one way because the town's snow plows didn't get to side streets. Yeah, and I get the wind thing. But we dressed for the occasion. At least, the smart ones did. Teenagers (me too when I was one), would go with bare-faces and hands, running shoes instead of boots, no hats. You've seen 'em. Hell, we have them out here in Vancouver, where its mild, wearing shorts in refrigerator temperatures. Anyway, I complained every year that it was too much for me and I would move to the coast where winters are mostly rain. So I finally did when I was 26 and you know what happened? The snow we would sometimes get (like the past 2 days) is so wet and heavy that I started wishing for prairie snow so I could take my son out sledding "properly". And the rain? Oh yeah, the temperatures aren't nearly as cold but when you're soaked to the core, your body can't tell, it just knows its shivering and miserable and your fingers are still devoid of all feeling. Wishing it would stop by day 3 is commonplace, wishing it would stop by day 14 is also commonplace. I've spent more time indoors since living out here, than my whole childhood in prairie winters. At least back then, we had sunshine after a snowstorm and we could bundle up, go out and play when we weren't shovelling and getting into car accidents from black ice. Here, I had to start taking Vitamin D3 because of the lack of sunshine. So you see, there is always better weather somewhere else. I bet if I lived where it was warm all the time, I'd be saying I was too hot, or the humidity was too high and a nice light rain would be really nice. If that's what you mean by weather ironies, no, you are not the only one that gets it.

Edited December 19, 2012 by Raymy

[Cuzosu]

Certainly I see your point.

I live in a desert, and I've always much wished I lived up in the mountains at least during the summer. Because of my genetics - this unfortunately is a hereditary thing - I'm much more prone to overheating than even feeling cold. So in the summer time I roast; as a child, during the summer I spent most of my time with the sprinkler on, jumping on a sopping wet trampoline with my brothers. Black feet, black knees, soaked clothes...and a lot of fun because we were semi-accident prone as a group and bouncing around with limited space only increased that. I'd sunbathe to dry off, usually, and often wound up sunburned or with a tan several shades darker - I'm one of those lucky people who typically only burns badly once a year and tans the rest of it.

Frankly, my bf and I agree on this: we'd rather live somewhere cold than somewhere hot, simply because it's easier to warm up than it is to cool down. And hotter places tend to have way more light, which is not such a good thing since he's dyslexic and gets migraines easily. Me, I don't mind some heat - but I much prefer the mountain summers here than the desert valley summers. I didn't ever overheat in the mountains as a kid, except during hunting season when the weather's changing and is difficult to judge. And that was because I was wearing too many layers; I stripped down as much as I could and ended up walking around in an orange vest, a T-shirt, and multiple layers of pants. (My lower half doesn't much notice temperature changes, or at least doesn't complain to me if it does. My upper half, on the other hand....)

You have a point - though I'd only been joking with my friend's mom, and I wasn't wearing gloves or even a heavy jacket, so I had every reason to be miserable during that ride back to the truck. Ever had sleet and hail hit the sensitive skin between your fingers while you were driving an ATV? Ouch. But what I was talking about with the 'weather ironies' comment was that, as if the weather itself was mocking me for joking about it, I got hit with all three types of weather my friend's mom and I had discussed, exactly two weeks after we discussed it. And then the truck didn't even get hit by the weather until after we were loaded and heading out. That's the ironic part, if you ask me. I muttered unflattering things under my breath for some time after I got into the truck. It wasn't funny...except that it was, of course.

Honestly my favorite weather is snow. I prefer dry snow, but as long as the wind isn't blowing hard enough to freeze me, I don't mind wet snow either. In that, I am very much a winter child. I love the winter weather around here, and camping and fires and roasting marshmallows and all those winter activities. And, honestly, if I had a job where I could work from home at least during the winter, I would love to live up in the mountains. Sure, snow me in! Make me shovel my roof! I'd have a specially built back porch where I could have fires all year long, with water or sand to put it out with close by just in case.