Tag Archives: Snow

Four letter word…

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Sure, sure, I know plenty of you out there on the interwebs are enthralled by how wonderful the post-Christmas snow has been. I’m here to tell you that you are, quite simply wrong. It’s cold, it’s wet, and it requires inordinate amounts of effort to move from Point A to Point B. Simply put, snow is just another four letter word. Like most other four letter words, its use is almost always inappropriate. It’s even more inappropriate on days when I’m already off and want to go out and do things and see people. Under the circumstances, snow is pretty much just an enormous pain in the ass with the singular redeeming quality of being kind of pretty.

Like a hot girl with the personality of a water buffalo, sometimes being pretty just isn’t good enough. The frozen nonsense can stop dropping out of the sky any time now.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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By popular demand, I’m pleased to post the 15th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. I promise, unless I’m cut down by another bout of the sickness, that I’ll do my best to keep up with it as a regular feature.

1. Primary Elections. The field of potential candidates starts out vast, but by the time a state with a real population gets around to voting the field has already shrunk to just a handful. By the time the great State of Maryland gets around to holding its primaries on April 3rd, it’s a pretty good bet that the field will have already narrowed down to one. Letting the party unite behind a single candidate early is great… for the candidate and for the party. It’s pretty crummy for the voters, though. If we can all agree that our national general election day is always going to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, surely we can come up with a similarly convoluted methodology for holding primary elections all on the same day. So, you know, my vote here in Maryland is worth as much as the ones cast in New Hampshire or South Carolina. I’ll hold my breath waiting on that good idea to take hold.

2. Sub-freezing Weather. Sure, I know everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. This is a blog after all, so it’s only real mission in life is to serve as a voice box for all the bitching and complaining I can come up with… Which is why I’m going to announce my official opposition to temperatures anywhere below 32 degrees. The only purpose of being that cold is to enable snow production and if there’s not going to be snow (and the accompanying day off from work), then it has no business being below freezing. There. I said it.

3. Ground Coffee. I’d be willing to say that my daily intake of coffee is probably higher than the average person, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. All I really want is just to be able to buy a pound of ground coffee. I don’t want a 12 ounce package, or God forbid, the 10.5 ounce size that I almost picked up. One pound of coffee gets me exactly through one week. It’s the perfect proportion of requirement to availability. 10.5 ounces, on the other hand, gets me to about Wednesday… for the same price I was paying for a full pound back in the “good old days”… You know, four or five years ago. I’m sure someone ran a focus group and said people would rather get a smaller size for the same cost than get the same size for a greater cost, but what that didn’t take into account was the people in that focus group were apparently morons. Seriously. Just give me a pound of coffee and if you have to charge me $12 instead of $8, I’ll live with that. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that decreased supply means increased price and with the notion that inflation drives up the price of everything over time. Trying to pull a slick one with packaging, though, just makes you look like a bunch of tools.

Missing it…

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I really have two minds when I watch the news covering the snow that fell on Memphis this morning and the on my old stomping grounds in Western Maryland tonight. Part of me that would be perfectly happy sitting on a beach watching the palm trees sway 24/7/365 is appalled that it’s only a matter of time before real winter finds me here on the cusp of the Eastern Shore. The other part of me that’s still 15 years old gets immediately giddy at even the mention of an impending snow storm. That would also be the part of me that insists on staying up too late on nights when snow is forecast to start late out of misplaced confidence that I’ll have the next day off.

For the last five years the closest thing I did to preparation for winter weather was grope under the driver’s seat until I found my ice scraper. It occurs to me that this might me an appropriate time to pick up an actual snow shovel or something. At some point sooner rather than later, the moderating influence of the Bay isn’t going to be enough to keep old man winter off the doorstep. For now, though, I think I’ll just be happy with the rain.

Snow…

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It’s Memphis… in March. There is absolutely no reason there needs to be snow here and yet, it’s out there covering everything. Actually, if I were being more specific, it’s slowly turning everything into a sheet of ice. Folks here are good at doing things like making barbecue, but when it comes to having a clue what to do about a couple of inches of snow, they should leave that to the professionals in the northern tier. I always mocked Washingtonians for their raging incompetence in dealing with this stuff… Now that I’ve seen how the south reacts, I’ll never say another bad word about them. These people couldn’t plow their way out of a parking lot, let alone keep the major highways clear. I’ve got a laundry list of things I wanted to do today, but I just don’t think I have it in me to go out and deal with “Memphis on Ice.”