Strange ending to a strange year
Writing by treason on Sunday, 31 of December , 2006 at 2:27 pm
This has been one odd year. It will be the first one since the Reagan administration in which I will have no W-2. How does that work, anyway? At any rate, we had our historic snowfall - the most in Albuquerque on record - and since the city really has no infrastructure for oddball events like this, the city pretty much stood still. My sister and her husband never did get to see my mother (the reason for the trip out, really), and we almost didn’t get to see each other.
I was on the phone with her this morning and was standing outside looking at the two-foot long icicles coming off the houses. The temperature dropped last night, so there was a layer of ice on everything. There was fog - an oddity in these parts - and ice crystals were falling like glitter from the sky. My sister asked if I could see a rainbow.
“I do.”
“We saw crystals and rainbows in the Sierras. Pretty, isn’t it?”
Later I saw three rainbows and an illusion that made it seem as if there were two suns in the sky. This type of stuff is unusual, so I have to take advantage when I can. The other night when it was snowing, T and I went outside to watch. There was so much snow it was bright, like daylight. A bird flew past us and landed on the neighbor’s roof.
“It’s three in the morning and that bird is confused.”
A friend had called and mentioned damaging “ice dams,” so T went out to knock snow and ice off the roof and try to relieve the weight on our poor plants. I decided to meet my sister and brother-in-law before they left for the train station and I’m glad I did.
The main roads were improving as the sun started to melt the snow and ice, but side streets were still tricky. We live at the top of a very steep hill, so I went down the side with fewer parked cars so there’d be less chance of sliding into something. I’d watched neighbors attempt to venture out yesterday and it wasn’t pretty. Although it took some effort, I made it down…slooooowly. Coming up was still a challenge, but all went well. Just really sloooow.
Traveling is not recommended. One friend who had flown in from Missouri to see another friend who had flown from here to Missouri, missed each other completely because her flight back was cancelled and then his flight out was almost cancelled; even Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t get out of here to be at Gerald Ford’s services at the Capitol last night. It’s been a wacky week.
I’m hoping the weather will keep more people indoors tonight, and safer than on other New Year’s Eves. I plan to stay in and watch more on the Ford services. Last night’s went well, so I’ll keep my comments to a minimum. Ted Stevens? Two words: term limits. Hastert? Solid. Cheney? The man is the president I’ll never get. I don’t understand those who say he isn’t a good speaker or is monotone. I could listen, enthralled, to the man reading names from the White Pages. A fine, fine speech. See what happens when you marry an English major?
All in all, it was a year in which we lost many first-rate human beings and one remarkable dog.
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