Wait Five Minutes….

If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change.

Yesterday was a total white out. Today is sunny and beautiful. The only proof of two blizzards in one week is three feet of snow outside and telecommunting because I can’t get to work.

As long as I remember, men would sit on their front porches and talk about the weather. “Yup, think it’ll rain today Vern?” And then they would spit out their chewing tabaca.

The difference between this blizzard and the last two blizzards this winter is that the husband is home! As such, I feel compelled to stay inside and have him direct snow removal operations.

Even the weather is politicized. How ironic that we live near Washington DC where there is record snow. I mean, I’m livin’ in history right now. This winter is on record as the snowiest ever recorded in Baltimore/DC. One inch of snow will paralyze the city, 65 inches over two weeks has effectively shut the government down. I would know, none of the government workers in my neighborhood have been to work all week.

And Washington DC is where the heart of the climate change debate rages on.

I know there are attempts being made to re-name this phenomena so that it actually fits the climate model. If it’s sunny, both sides use that as proof that their position is right. If it blizzards then that’s used to dispute the opposite side of the debate.

I think the worse thing about this weather debate is that it has successfully reduced the status of scientists to the level of lawyers and politicians. People use to respect the scientific community and what they postulate. But they – the scientists - have let themselves be seduced by power and potential economic largesse by attempting to define the political debate.

It’s unseemly, it’s low, it’s icky. It makes them look silly. It drives me bonkers.

Anyway, I don’t know what to believe. I guess I would say this: the weather always changes, even before the Industrial Revolution. We’ve only been monitoring the weather for a short time compared to the age of the earth. I guess if the climate didn’t change, we would still be in an ice age? Or maybe we wouldn’t have seven continents? Would Death Valley still be part of the ocean? Would Hawaii even exist if the climate there didn’t change?

I guess one man’s climate change is another man’s winter, spring, summer and fall.

You say potato, I say potato…

Here are my kids trying to get the ice off of the heat pump with the girl’s pink hair dryer yesterday.

It’s not like it used to be when I was a kid. I remember it snowing all the time! How ironic that I lived in Thailand, Jamaica and Algeria for most of my childhood…didn’t snow in those places. What I remember was the couple of years in upstate New York and in Pennsylvania. The husband says the same thing, but he’s from Indiana, where it snowed all the time. I know what my kids will say when they become adults.

“I remember it snowed all the time when I was a kid. Not like now.” Yah.

There’s the neighbor kids blowing our driveway because they say they are bored. Don’t worry, we gave them some money.

See that lump in the snow? That’s our pool. Or what’s left of the pool cover.

The kids will be out of school for the rest of the week because of the snow. The last two weeks, they have been in school 1.5 days. They are both thrilled and bored at the same time.

It’s tough being a kid. Who knows if we’ll even have winter when they are adults. They better enjoy it now.