Good News, Bad News

I think I'll start with the bad news ...

It's been a harsh winter here in Utah. This is my ninth winter since relocating from Northern Virginia to Utah for my job. Without question, we have seen more snow at my house than in any of the previous eight winters, and we still have six to eight weeks of potential winter weather to go.

Snow in Utah is not dealt out very evenhandedly. Sitting here in the Salt Lake Valley, we are surrounded by mountains, especially the Wasatch Mountains just to our east. The Wasatch Mountains are where Park City and all those hot ski slopes (Deer Valley, Alta, Snowbird, etc.) are. Obviously, they get considerably more snow in the mountains than we will ever see in the valley. Which is all to the good, since we need the mountain snow to fuel the winter tourism economy (Sundance only brings people to Utah for a week or two, after all.) and to fill the mountain reservoirs when temperatures eventually rise in June or July. (Hah!)

Even in the valley, though, the same storm will deliver remarkably different results, depending on where one lives. We only got a couple of inches in Sandy this past Sunday night/Monday morning, while in South Jordan, just a handful of miles to our west, they got nearly a foot. A couple of weeks ago, on Martin Luther King's birthday, while only four to eight inches fell almost everywhere else, even in the mountains, Sandy was hit with 15-18 inches of the cold, white stuff.

The storm had started in the early morning hours, and as I left for work, only a couple of inches had fallen at our house. My wife is a teacher, so she had the day off. As the inches kept mounting, she went outside periodically and fired up the snowblower, pretty effectively keeping our driveway clear. (Did I marry well, or what? Add to that the fact that I never have to apologize for watching football, since she is, if anything, a bigger sports fan than I am. She even watches baseball on television. During the regular season. A test for even the most avid sports fanatic, if you ask me.)

When I got home, I had to clear our sidewalks, which is a formidable task, since we have a corner lot, plus dig out around our mail box, so the mailman, rested though he might be after the MLK holiday, wouldn't have to work too hard to leave us our bills and advertising flyers.

It's been two weeks since that storm. For the first week or so, it was calmer, and temperatures even rose a bit, and some of that heavy snow melted, though the huge piles along the sides of the roads and driveways remained impressive. But then we began a cycle of storms that delivered a few inches of new snow every 48 hours or so. We ran out of Ice Melt last week, and it's been so bad that all of the stores in the area have been sold out of that, of rock salt, and even, as they told me when I went into K-Mart yesterday, of snow shovels.

Despite the lack of chemical assistance, as of late yesterday afternoon, I had managed to achieve a state of bare concrete on all of our sidewalks and two lanes of driveway. I went to bed with a great sense of accomplishment. Better still, despite the effort expended breaking up and removing ice pack at the end of our driveway and elsewhere, I woke up this morning surprisingly free of aches and pains.

At least until I went out to get the morning paper. If only I had heeded the warning I was given. When I opened the front door, I noticed that there were icicles hanging from the edges of the gutters running across the front of the house. If it hadn't been so early, I'd like to think that my brain would have made the following connection - icicles means water had been dripping, then refroze as the temperatures dropped during the night. Water dripping plus freezing temperatures means a layer of ice on the front steps.

This didn't run through my mind until after my feet flew out from under me and I found myself airborne, on the way to a hard landing on my lower back on the sidewalk out front. Given that there were steps behind me, I'm just grateful that I didn't crack my head open in the process. After scrambling back into the house, shouting obscenities all the way to get my wife's attention, I was finally able to determine that, apart from a very sore and stiff lower back, I had escaped my fall uninjured.

So it's been a day of acetaminophen every couple of hours and gritting my teeth every time I had to get up from my desk to visit the men's room or go anywhere else. Fortunately, my SUV has heated seats, which actually helped ease the pain in my back as I drove.

As for the good news, though I had planned to wait until I had been posting for at least a week, I ended up sharing the fact that I had starting blogging again with Kirsten J. from my office. We were chatting about it via an internal IM system we use at work. I was explaining about the source for the blog's name, and the talk turned to literature. Before I knew it, we had discussed, not only Tolkien, but some of my favorite authors, including Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) , Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There) and Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities), as well as a couple of K.J.'s favorites, one of whom, Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), was a teacher of Ken Kesey's.

It was just the sort of exchange, in microcosm, at least, that I hope this blog will lead to. I came away from it with a couple of ideas for new books to read, and I hope that K.J. did, as well.

Now I just have to figure out how to play the blogging game, so that others whose interests intersect my own can find my blog and are motivated to post comments remarking on some of my observations, as well as sharing their own.