It is officially Spring, so of course the morning is completely screwed up. Yesterday, I was thinking about green shoots, and snow peas and hot peppers and the growing season to come. I will have an account of some of the pithier suggestions for avoiding green-horn mistakes in the garden, maybe tomorrow. It was fun to read them, right up until the moment I heard the weather forecast: snow coming.
Naturally I did what any Washingtonian would do. I panicked, and shut down Refuge Farm to get hunkered down back in the Imperial City. I will spare you any gratuitous comments about the tenacious hold that winter has on us, just the way the drifts are piling up in England, where they said this generation of children would never see snow.
Predictably, though, the Climate Scientists have managed to twist things up to demonstrate that it is Global Warming that is causing it to be colder.
I think warm is better than cold, all things considered, and read with interest a recent story about an ancient tunic- third century AD- that was found in a melting glacier. It is pretty cool, and the thrust of the article was that it is getting so warm….that things that were dropped on the dry ground a couple millennia ago are only now emerging from the ice. My take-away was that it must have been warmer then than now, or else the shirt would not have been under all that ice, but what do I know. Climate is not weather, right, and we have to panic about something, right?
So we are panicking here today. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was burned when they canceled the government work-day a few weeks ago when conditions seemed to favor another Snowmageddon event. They had egg on their collective faces when all we got was a chill dank rain. So they did not cancel the government today, instead relying on magical thinking, and the snow is piling up in a slushy mass.
“Messy and surprising,” is how WAMU, the local NPR outlet, is putting it at the moment, and I am listening to the reports of fallen wires and vehicular chaos with trepidation.
I am enough of a Washington insider to freely acknowledge my inner wimp. “If it is snowing,” I have learned to say, “I ain’t going.”
That is a pretty evolved thing for a Michigan kid to admit. We used to look at the drive Up North, 250 miles on glare ice or in blizzard, and consider the tense hours on the road well worth it just to attend a party.
Now I am looking at the clock, dreading the fact that I have been summoned to the Veteran’s Administration for an evaluation, and I am going to have to go out in the slush. It is a seven-mile drive, according to Google, and I have no idea how long it will take.
Or if the Doctor is going to actually be there should I arrive.
In the Veteran’s Day storm of 1986 it took eight hours to get from the Navy Annex back to Fairfax County.
Capital of the Free World my sorry butt. First pitch at Nationals Stadium in a week.It is just flat amazing.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche