The north wind doth blow

I do not like snow. Oh, I'm okay with it if it snows Christmas Eve and looks pretty for a few hours. But then I want it to go away.

I will not bore you and rehash anecdotes of how people in Seattle haven't got a clue how to drive in the snow.  Truth be told, people in Seattle are pretty crappy driver's no matter what the weather. They just treat snow as an excuse to slide into each other and blame it on the weather rather than their own inadequate driving skills.

My children like snow because they rarely experience it here. I imagine if it rarely rained here, they would like the rain as well. I, on the other hand, grew up with snow on a fairly regular basis during the winter. There are only so many snowmen you can make before it loses its appeal.

I don't like to be cold. So naturally snow falls with an automatic strike against it in my book. It reminds me of learning to ski when I was 17 and having to get up at the crack of dawn every day for a week during my Christmas break to catch a bus to Bogus Basin Ski resort. There I'd stand in line at the rental place to get my skis and trudge to my beginner's class that lasted all day. I had secondhand boots that didn't fit right and absorbed water. So basically I was miserable the entire time.

Snow for my children inevitably means no school. When I was a kid they never shut the school down for snow. It was just a few blocks from my house anyway. Even then snow stressed me out because our school had a strict policy forbidding you to throw snowballs. The penalty was a spanking by the principal. And he was this sadistic bald guy who had this big wooden paddle on display in his office.

Now I wouldn't have thrown a snowball because I was deathly afraid of authority at that age, but for whatever reason, the snow still stressed me out since who knows whether I might have unintentional tried to wipe snow off my glove and have it perceived as throwing snow. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd been punished unjustly in grade school for crimes I didn't commit. Teachers in that era had a tendency to be judge and jury.

Oh well, since I started drafting this post the snow came and went. It was followed by torrential rain and winds. And now the snow if a mere melted memory.

Now I can go back to complaining about politics.